Assuming that bidders wish to acquire at most one item, this paper defines a polynomial time multi-item auction that locates the VCG prices in a finite number of iterations for any given starting prices. This auction is called the Vickrey–English–Dutch auction and it contains the Vickrey–English auction [Sankaran, J.K., 1994. On a dynamic auction mechanism for a bilateral assignment problem. Math. Soc. Sci. 28, 143–150] and the Vickrey–Dutch auction [Mishra, D., Parkes, D., 2009. Multi-item Vickrey–Dutch auctions. Games Econ. Behav. 66, 326–347] as special cases. By means of numerical experiments, it is showed that when the auctioneer knows the biddersʼ value distributions, the Vickrey–English–Dutch auction is weakly faster than the Vickrey–English auction and the Vickrey–Dutch auction in 89 percent and 99 percent, respectively, of the investigated problems. A greedy version of the Vickrey–English–Dutch auction is demonstrated to perform even better in the simulation studies.
['Tommy Andersson', 'Albin Erlanson']
Multi-Item Vickrey-English-Dutch Auctions