Fourier Analysis-based Iterative Combinatorial Auctions

Fourier Analysis-based Iterative Combinatorial Auctions

Jakob Weissteiner, Chris Wendler, Sven Seuken, Ben Lubin, Markus Püschel

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 549-556. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/78

Recent advances in Fourier analysis have brought new tools to efficiently represent and learn set functions. In this paper, we bring the power of Fourier analysis to the design of combinatorial auctions (CAs). The key idea is to approximate bidders' value functions using Fourier-sparse set functions, which can be computed using a relatively small number of queries. Since this number is still too large for practical CAs, we propose a new hybrid design: we first use neural networks (NNs) to learn bidders’ values and then apply Fourier analysis to the learned representations. On a technical level, we formulate a Fourier transform-based winner determination problem and derive its mixed integer program formulation. Based on this, we devise an iterative CA that asks Fourier-based queries. We experimentally show that our hybrid ICA achieves higher efficiency than prior auction designs, leads to a fairer distribution of social welfare, and significantly reduces runtime. With this paper, we are the first to leverage Fourier analysis in CA design and lay the foundation for future work in this area. Our code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/marketdesignresearch/FA-based-ICAs.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems
Machine Learning: Learning Sparse Models
Machine Learning: Regression
Machine Learning: Feature Extraction, Selection and Dimensionality Reduction