Friday
Recent advances in information technology and its rapid acceptance by the business community have allowed for the possibility of expediting complex business transactions. The most prominent example is use of auctions in corporate procurement and in government deregulation efforts. When many items with interrelated values are being sold, economic efficiency can be increased by allowing bidders to make bids on combinations of items. Procedures for auctioning combinations of items have inherent computational problems that have to be overcome, and the emergence of these issues has sparked considerable research activity in the computer science and combinatorial optimization communities. The most prominent example is combinatorial auctions in which multiple goods are auctioned and bidders have and wish to express different valuations on which goods complement each other and which goods substitute for each other.
Topics of interest include:
-- expressive bidding languages
-- practical applications (e.g. to electricity, spectrum,...)
-- procurement and e-sourcing
-- combinatorial exchanges
-- preference elicitation
-- optimal auction design
-- approximate mechanisms
-- communication and computation complexity in combinatorial auctions