Meta-mechanisms for Combinatorial Auctions over Social Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces meta-mechanisms that transform classical auction mechanisms into network-aware mechanisms, preserving key properties and enabling combinatorial auctions over social networks for the first time.

Contribution

It proposes a general framework for converting classical auction mechanisms into network settings while maintaining their desirable properties, specifically for combinatorial auctions.

Findings

Meta-mechanisms successfully transform classical mechanisms to social network settings.

Preservation of key properties in the transformed mechanisms.

First known design of combinatorial auctions over social networks.

Abstract

Recently there has been a large amount of research designing mechanisms for auction scenarios where the bidders are connected in a social network. Different from the existing studies in this field that focus on specific auction scenarios e.g. single-unit auction and multi-unit auction, this paper considers the following question: is it possible to design a scheme that, given a classical auction scenario and a mechanism $\tilde{\mathcal{M}}$ suited for it, produces a mechanism in the network setting that preserves the key properties of $\tilde{\mathcal{M}}$? To answer this question, we design meta-mechanisms that provide a uniform way of transforming mechanisms from classical models to mechanisms over networks and prove that the desirable properties are preserved by our meta-mechanisms. Our meta-mechanisms provide solutions to combinatorial auction scenarios in the network setting: (1) combinatorial auction with single-minded buyers and (2) combinatorial auction with general monotone valuation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that designs combinatorial auctions over a social network.