Collaborative Research: Data-Driven Mechanism Design for Combinatorial Auctions and Exchanges

Sponsor: National Science Foundation

Award Number: 1761163

Abstract:

As there are multiple design objectives in the construction of market mechanisms (efficiency, revenue, incentives, simplicity, etc.), there is no single perfect market design involving combinatorial values. Instead, there is a substantial literature in which a large variety of designs have been suggested. What is missing from this literature, however, is a sound methodology for comparing competing designs under realistic models of participants’ values. This project addresses this shortcoming by creating a simulation platform that will support data-driven comparisons of combinatorial market designs in the spectrum auction and cloud computing domains. This platform will be open and accessible to the research community, practitioners, and public agencies to rigorously evaluate existing market designs, variations on those designs, and entirely new designs, and to definitively point to features that render some designs better than others in their chosen application domains.

This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

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