Double-Auction Mechanisms for Resource Trading Markets

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a double-auction resource trading mechanism, revealing that strategic behavior by link-suppliers causes significant efficiency loss, and proposes a Stackelberg game modification to mitigate this loss.

Contribution

It identifies the limitations of the existing auction mechanism under strategic agents and introduces a Stackelberg game approach to improve efficiency.

Findings

Strategic link-suppliers cause 100% efficiency loss in the original mechanism.

The Stackelberg game reduces worst-case efficiency loss to 25% with quadratic costs.

Efficiency improves with higher-degree polynomial cost functions.

Abstract

We consider a double-auction mechanism, which was recently proposed in the context of rate allocation in mobile data-offloading markets. Network operators (users) derive benefit from offloading their traffic to third party WiFi or femtocell networks (link-suppliers). Link-suppliers experience costs for the additional capacity that they provide. Users and link-suppliers (collectively referred to as agents) have their pay-offs and cost functions as private knowledge. A network-manager decomposes the problem into a network problem and agent problems. The surrogate pay-offs and cost functions are modulated by the agents' bids. Agents' payoffs and costs are then determined by the allocations and prices set by the network-manager. Under this design, so long as the agents do not anticipate the effect of their actions on the prices set by the network-manager (i.e., price-taking agents), a competitive equilibrium exists as a solution to the network and agent problems, and this equilibrium optimizes the sum utility of all agents. However, this design fails when the agents are all strategic (price-anticipating). Specifically, the presence of a strategic link-supplier drives the system to an undesirable equilibrium with zero participation resulting in an efficiency loss of 100%. This is in stark contrast to an earlier setting where the users alone are strategic but the link-supplier is not - the efficiency loss is known to be at most 34%. The paper then proposes a Stackelberg game modification where the efficiency loss can be characterized in terms of the link-supplier's cost function when the users' pay-off functions are linear. Specifically, when the link-supplier's cost function is quadratic, the worst case efficiency loss is 25%. Further, the loss in efficiency improves for polynomial cost functions of higher degree.