Diffusion and Auction on Graphs

Diffusion and Auction on Graphs

Bin Li, Dong Hao, Dengji Zhao, Makoto Yokoo

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 435-441. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/62

Auction is the common paradigm for resource allocation which is a fundamental problem in human society. Existing research indicates that the two primary objectives, the seller's revenue and the allocation efficiency, are generally conflicting in auction design. For the first time, we expand the domain of the classic auction to a social graph and formally identify a new class of auction mechanisms on graphs. All mechanisms in this class are incentive-compatible and also promote all buyers to diffuse the auction information to others, whereby both the seller's revenue and the allocation efficiency are significantly improved comparing with the Vickrey auction. It is found that the recently proposed information diffusion mechanism is an extreme case with the lowest revenue in this new class. Our work could potentially inspire a new perspective for the efficient and optimal auction design and could be applied into the prevalent online social and economic networks.  
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Algorithmic Game Theory
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Multi-agent Planning