Multi-item Auctions in Mechanism Design I'm new to auction theory and only started reading it a few days ago.
My question is this: Is it possible to design efficient auctions of multiple non-identical items? By efficient I mean maximize the social welfare.
Also, let's say there is only one seller who owns all items and seeks to sell them to multiple bidders who can get at most one item.
I'm a little discouraged as I haven't found a lot of theory papers on this problem. Is it because what I described above is a special of bundling (where bundle sets are singletons)?
I'd appreciate it immensely if you could direct me to a source (paper or book). Thank you.
There’s a large literature on this in both CS and Economics. For economics, a good starting point would be Vijay krishna’s Auction Theory book (2009 edition). It has a whole section on multi-object auctions.
For CS, check out some of the papers by Jason Hartline. He may have lecture notes as well. Naom Nisan and others have a book called algorithmic game theory where some chapters (if I remember correctly) deal with multi-object auctions.