Auctions, Market Mechanisms, and Their Applications. Second International ICST Conference, AMMA 2011, NewYork, NY, USA, August 22-23, 2011, Revised Selected Papers

Research Article

Crowdsourced Bayesian Auctions

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-30913-7_12,
        author={Pablo Azar and Jing Chen and Silvio Micali},
        title={Crowdsourced Bayesian Auctions},
        proceedings={Auctions, Market Mechanisms, and Their Applications. Second International ICST Conference, AMMA 2011, NewYork, NY, USA, August 22-23, 2011, Revised Selected Papers},
        proceedings_a={AMMA},
        year={2012},
        month={10},
        keywords={Optimal Auctions Implementation Theory Robust Mechanism Design Proper Scoring Rules},
        doi={10.1007/978-3-642-30913-7_12}
    }
    
  • Pablo Azar
    Jing Chen
    Silvio Micali
    Year: 2012
    Crowdsourced Bayesian Auctions
    AMMA
    Springer
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-30913-7_12
Pablo Azar1,*, Jing Chen1,*, Silvio Micali1,*
  • 1: MIT
*Contact email: azar@csail.mit.edu, jingchen@csail.mit.edu, silvio@csail.mit.edu

Abstract

We investigate the problem of optimal mechanism design, where an auctioneer wants to sell a set of goods to buyers, in order to maximize revenue. In a Bayesian setting the buyers’ valuations for the goods are drawn from a prior distribution , which is often assumed to be known by the seller. In this work, we focus on cases where the seller has no knowledge at all, and “the buyers know each other better than the seller knows them”. In our model, is not necessarily common knowledge. Instead, each player individually knows a posterior distribution associated with . Since the seller relies on the buyers’ knowledge to help him set a price, we call these types of auctions