Combinatorial Market Processing for Multilateral Coordination
Abstract
We study a classical question in a modern context. There are a number of buyers and sellers of a number of distinct goods. Each participant is selfish- It cares more for its own benefit than of the social welfare. Each good is indivisible. It must go completely to one of the participants. Moreover, the participants are not passive' as Smith 157 and Walras 167 believed, but actively' take actions to further their interest in the spirit of Cournot 27 and Edgeworth 37, and later, von Neumann and Morgenstern 117 and Nash 116. We are thus interested in the following questions. When does an equilibrium exist in a market with several indivisible goods? And what economic mechanisms yield an allocation that promotes the welfare of the society as a whole? To put it more concretely, we want to examine the existence of competitive equilibrium a combinatorial market, i.e., an exchange economy with several indivisible goods such that consumers have interdependent valuations: A consumer's utility is for a bundle of indivisible goods. Further, we seek auction or market mechanisms that yield social welfare maximizing allocations when participants or agents exercise strategic behavior. Despite this being a long standing question, it has only been incompletely resolved for the setting of interest. The following problems from communication networks and operations research motivated this work.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA440077
Entities
People
- Pravin Varalye
- Rahul Jain
Organizations
- University of California, Berkeley