99% Revenue with Constant Enhanced Competition
Linda Cai, Raghuvansh R. Saxena

TL;DR
This paper proves that a simple auction with a linear number of bidders can achieve nearly the same revenue as the optimal auction in multi-item settings, improving previous bounds and enabling prior-independent mechanisms.
Contribution
It establishes that $O(n)$ bidders suffice to approximate optimal revenue for all item and bidder counts, advancing the understanding of simple auction efficacy.
Findings
Simple auctions with $O(n)$ bidders approximate optimal revenue.
Prior-independent auctions can achieve similar revenue for regular items.
The result holds universally for all $m$ and $n$.
Abstract
The enhanced competition paradigm is an attempt at bridging the gap between simple and optimal auctions. In this line of work, given an auction setting with items and bidders, the goal is to find the smallest such that selling the items to bidders through a simple auction generates (almost) the same revenue as the optimal auction. Recently, Feldman, Friedler, and Rubinstein [EC, 2018] showed that an arbitrarily large constant fraction of the optimal revenue from selling items to a single bidder can be obtained via simple auctions with a constant number of bidders. However, their techniques break down even for two bidders, and can only show a bound of . Our main result is that bidders suffice for all values of and . That is, we show that, for all and , an arbitrarily large constant fraction of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAuction Theory and Applications · Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing · Optimization and Search Problems
