Bidding

About: Bidding is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 15371 publications have been published within this topic receiving 294233 citations. The topic is also known as: competitive bidding.

On profit maximization in mechanism design

Abstract: Mechanism design is a subfield of game theory and microeconomics focused on incentive engineering. A mechanism is a protocol, typically taking the form of an auction, that is explicitly designed so that rational but non-cooperative agents, motivated solely by their self-interest, end up achieving the designer's goals. The challenge of mechanism design is to apply these methods to traditional computer science goals such as worst-case or competitive analysis. We consider two challenging problems related to mechanism design for profit maximization: the analysis of natural bidding strategies used by participants in sponsored search auctions, and the design of a mechanism for matroid procurement with provable performance guarantees. The sponsored search auctions of web search engines such as Google or Yahoo! use the generalized second-price (GSP) mechanism, in which bidders do not have a dominant strategy. We develop a framework for studying a variety of greedy bidding strategies and analyze their revenue, convergence and robustness properties. We compare the performance of greedy bidding strategies to that of a Nash equilibrium, quantifying how close these bidding strategies are to one of the most natural and rational stable points of the system. In the procurement problem a buyer is given a set of agents with values, along with a family of feasible sets over the agents. The goal is to procure a feasible set of maximum value, for minimum cost. Assuming that a buyer obtains a decreasing marginal benefit per feasible set procured, the problem is to determine the optimal number of feasible sets to procure in order to maximize the buyer's profit. We develop a mechanism that approximates the optimal profit to within a constant factor, when the set system is a matroid. Matroids are important structures in combinatorial optimization: for example, minimum spanning trees and node-weighted maximum matchings are both matroid problems. We also show that the well-known cost sharing revenue extraction mechanism is only truthful for matroid set systems, so that procurement problems over non-matroid set systems are not likely to be solved with current techniques.

Bidding to host a major sports event : The local organising committee perspective.

Abstract: Major sports events have the potential to offer significant benefits to any city, but at the same time are likely to entail immense resource utilisation and enormous risk. Focussed at the organising committee level, and drawing upon general management and project management literature, aims to collect empirical data to identify current management practice used in the bidding process, and determine key factors in successful bidding. A self‐administered postal questionnaire was sent to 220 randomly selected major sports event organisers from ten different countries. Targeted at the chief executive officer level or equivalent, the questionnaire provided general contextual detail and focussed on present sports event management practices and processes. To gain more in‐depth understanding of successful applications, three semi‐structured interviews were administered in England. The findings reveal that the primary motivations behind local authority involvement are heightening area profile and sport promotion. Successful public sector applications were found to use bounded rational decision‐making, driven largely by political reasoning rather than detailed objective analysis. Specifically identifies and discusses five key factors behind successful national and international governing body approval.

Value of Information Lotteries

Abstract: The essence of decision-making is understanding the economic impact of uncertainty. In this paper a previous discussion of information value theory is extended to illustrate how the availability of information on the uncertain factors of a problem affects the probability density function of profit, the profit lottery. A bidding problem serves to demonstrate the type of calculations required and their implications.