Auction Design for the Efficient Allocation of Service Capacity Under Congestion

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Barrera, Jorge; Garcia, Alfredo
• 署名单位: University of Virginia; State University System of Florida; University of Florida
• 刊物名称: OPERATIONS RESEARCH
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0030-364X
• DOI: 10.1287/opre.2014.1333
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 151-165
• 关键词: commodities; mechanisms; STABILITY

摘要

We consider the problem of efficiently allocating the capacity of a number of service facilities (prone to congestion) to a set of users with private information regarding their willingness to pay for different combinations of throughput versus latency. Auction mechanisms can be used to schedule the service capacity of available facilities. However, the interdependency of users' valuations implies that simple uniform price adjustment processes (e.g., tatonnement) either fail to effectively clear or are subject to strategic manipulation. In this paper, we propose an iterative auction design and show that (i) it is efficient (i.e., the auction closes with the allocation of service that maximizes the social welfare) and (ii) it is strategy-proof, that is, it is a dominant strategy for users to truthfully reveal their demand for service capacity throughout the auction.