We consider the Arrow--Debreu exchange market model under the assumption that the agents' demands satisfy the weak gross substitutes (WGS) property. We present a simple auction algorithm that obtains an approximate market equilibrium for WGS demands assuming the availability of a price update oracle. We exhibit specific implementations of such an oracle for WGS demands with bounded price elasticities and for Gale demand systems.
As an application of our result, we obtain an efficient algorithm to find an approximate spending-restricted market equilibrium for WGS demands, a model that has been recently introduced as a continuous relaxation of the Nash social welfare (NSW) problem. This leads to a polynomial-time constant factor approximation algorithm for the NSW problem with capped additive separable piecewise linear utility functions; only a pseudopolynomial approximation algorithm was known for this setting previously.
We derive optimal strategies for a bidding agent that participates in multiple, simultaneous second-price auctions with perfect substitutes. We prove that, if everyone else bids locally in a single auction, the global bidder should always place non-zero bids in all available auctions, provided there are no budget constraints. With a budget, however, the optimal strategy is to bid locally if this budget is equal or less than the valuation. Furthermore, for a wide range of valuation distributions, we prove that the problem of finding the optimal bids reduces to two dimensions if all auctions are…
We introduce a novel characterization of all Walrasian price vectors in terms of forbidden over- and under demanded sets for monotone gross substitute combinatorial auctions. For ascending and descending auctions we suggest a universal framework for finding the minimum or maximum Walrasian price vectors for monotone gross substitute combinatorial auctions. An ascending (descending) auction is guaranteed to find the minimum (maximum) Walrasian if and only if it follows the suggested framework.
We present a family of submodular valuation classes that generalizes gross substitute. We show that Walrasian equilibrium always exist for one class in this family, and there is a natural ascending auction which finds it. We prove some new structural properties on gross-substitute auctions which, in turn, show that the known ascending auctions for this class (Gul-Stacchetti and Ausbel) are, in fact, identical. We generalize these two auctions, and provide a simple proof that they terminate in a Walrasian equilibrium.
We consider the class of valuations on indivisible items called gross-substitute (GS). This class was introduced by Kelso and Crawford (1982) and is widely used in studies of markets with indivisibilities. GS is a condition on the demand-flow in a specific scenario: some items become more expensive while other items retain their price. We prove that GS implies a much stronger condition, describing the demand-flow in the general scenario in which all prices may change. We prove that the demand of GS agents always flows (weakly) downwards, i.e, from items with higher price-increase to items with…
The class of gross substitutes (GS) set functions plays a central role in Economics and Computer Science. GS belongs to the hierarchy of {\em complement free} valuations introduced by Lehmann, Lehmann and Nisan, along with other prominent classes: $GS \subsetneq Submodular \subsetneq XOS \subsetneq Subadditive$. The GS class has always been more enigmatic than its counterpart classes, both in its definition and in its relation to the other classes. For example, while it is well understood how closely the Submodular, XOS and Subadditive classes (point-wise) approximate one another, approximabil…
Computational and economic results suggest that social welfare maximization and combinatorial auction design are much easier when bidders' valuations satisfy the "gross substitutes" condition. The goal of this paper is to evaluate rigorously the folklore belief that the main take-aways from these results remain valid in settings where the gross substitutes condition holds only approximately. We show that for valuations that pointwise approximate a gross substitutes valuation (in fact even a linear valuation), optimal social welfare cannot be approximated to within a subpolynomial factor and de…
Gross substitutability is a central concept in Economics and is connected to important notions in Discrete Convex Analysis, Number Theory and the analysis of Greedy algorithms in Computer Science. Many different characterizations are known for this class, but providing a constructive description remains a major open problem. The construction problem asks how to construct all gross substitutes from a class of simpler functions using a set of operations. Since gross substitutes are a natural generalization of matroids to real-valued functions, matroid rank functions form a desirable such class o…
We show an auction-based algorithm to compute market equilibrium prices in a production model, where consumers purchase items under separable nonlinear utility concave functions which satisfy W.G.S(Weak Gross Substitutes); producers produce items with multiple linear production constraints. Our algorithm differs from previous approaches in that the prices are allowed to both increase and decrease to handle changes in the production. This provides a t^atonnement style algorithm which converges and provides a PTAS. The algorithm can also be extended to arbitrary convex production regions and the…
We show that a competitive equilibrium always exists in combinatorial auctions with anonymous graphical valuations and pricing, using discrete geometry. This is an intuitive and easy-to-construct class of valuations that can model both complementarity and substitutes, and to our knowledge, it is the first class besides gross substitutes that have guaranteed competitive equilibrium. We prove through counter-examples that our result is tight, and we give explicit algorithms for constructive competitive pricing vectors. We also give extensions to multi-unit combinatorial auctions (also known as p…
Motivated by applications such as stock exchanges and spectrum auctions, there is a growing interest in mechanisms for arranging trade in two-sided markets. Existing mechanisms are either not truthful, or do not guarantee an asymptotically-optimal gain-from-trade, or rely on a prior on the traders' valuations, or operate in limited settings such as a single kind of good. We extend the random market-halving technique used in earlier works to markets with multiple kinds of goods, where traders have gross-substitute valuations. We present MIDA: a Multi Item-kind Double-Auction mechanism. It is pr…
This paper addresses the computational challenges of learning strong substitutes demand when given access to a demand (or valuation) oracle. Strong substitutes demand generalises the well-studied gross substitutes demand to a multi-unit setting. Recent work by Baldwin and Klemperer shows that any such demand can be expressed in a natural way as a finite list of weighted bid vectors. A simplified version of this bidding language has been used by the Bank of England. Assuming access to a demand oracle, we provide an algorithm that computes the unique list of weighted bid vectors corresponding to…
Substitute valuations (in some contexts called gross substitute valuations) are prominent in combinatorial auction theory. An algorithm is given in this paper for generating a substitute valuation through Monte Carlo simulation. In addition, the geometry of the set of all substitute valuations for a fixed number of goods K is investigated. The set consists of a union of polyhedrons, and the maximal polyhedrons are identified for K=4. It is shown that the maximum dimension of the maximal polyhedrons increases with K nearly as fast as two to the power K. Consequently, under broad conditions, if …
Ascending Auctions for Combinatorial Markets with Frictions: A Unified Framework via Discrete Convex Analysis
Institute for Chemical Reaction Design and Discovery (ICReDD), Hokkaido University（北海道大学化学反应设计与发现研究所）；D3 Center, The University of Osaka（大阪大学D3中心）；Center for Advanced Intelligence Project, RIKEN（理化学研究所先进智能项目中心）；School of Science and Engineering, Chuo University（中央大学理工学部）
As is well known, many classes of markets have efficient equilibria, but this depends on agents being non-strategic, i.e. that they declare their true demands when offered goods at particular prices, or in other words, that they are price-takers. An important question is how much the equilibria degrade in the face of strategic behavior, i.e. what is the Price of Anarchy (PoA) of the market viewed as a mechanism? Often, PoA bounds are modest constants such as 4/3 or 2. Nonetheless, in practice a guarantee that no more than 25% or 50% of the economic value is lost may be unappealing. This paper …
We study algorithms for combinatorial market design problems, where a set of heterogeneous and indivisible objects are priced and sold to potential buyers subject to equilibrium constraints. Extending the CWE notion introduced by Feldman et al. [STOC 2013], we introduce the concept of a Market-Clearing Combinatorial Walrasian Equilibium (MC-CWE) as a natural relaxation of the classical Walrasian equilibrium (WE) solution concept. The only difference between a MC-CWE and a WE is the ability for the seller to bundle the items prior to sale. This innocuous and natural bundling operation imposes a…
This paper continues the study, initiated by Cole and Fleischer, of the behavior of a tatonnement price update rule in Ongoing Fisher Markets. The prior work showed fast convergence toward an equilibrium when the goods satisfied the weak gross substitutes property and had bounded demand and income elasticities. The current work shows that fast convergence also occurs for the following types of markets: - All pairs of goods are complements to each other, and - the demand and income elasticities are suitably bounded. In particular, these conditions hold when all buyers in the market are equipped…
We present the first polynomial time algorithm for computing Walrasian equilibrium in an economy with indivisible goods and \emph{general} buyer valuations having only access to an \emph{aggregate demand oracle}, i.e., an oracle that given prices on all goods, returns the aggregated demand over the entire population of buyers. For the important special case of gross substitute valuations, our algorithm queries the aggregate demand oracle $\widetilde{O}(n)$ times and takes $\widetilde{O}(n^3)$ time, where $n$ is the number of goods. At the heart of our solution is a method for exactly minimizin…
We study equilibria of markets with $m$ heterogeneous indivisible goods and $n$ consumers with combinatorial preferences. It is well known that a competitive equilibrium is not guaranteed to exist when valuations are not gross substitutes. Given the widespread use of bundling in real-life markets, we study its role as a stabilizing and coordinating device by considering the notion of \emph{competitive bundling equilibrium}: a competitive equilibrium over the market induced by partitioning the goods for sale into fixed bundles. Compared to other equilibrium concepts involving bundles, this noti…
We study competition between firms in labor markets, following a combinatorial model suggested by Kelso and Crawford [1982]. In this model, each firm is trying to recruit workers by offering a higher salary than its competitors, and its production function defines the utility generated from any actual set of recruited workers. We define two natural classes of production functions for firms, where the first one is based on additive capacities (weights), and the second on the influence of workers in a social network. We then analyze the existence of pure subgame perfect equilibrium (PSPE) in the…
This paper shows that in suitable markets, even with out-of-equilibrium trade allowed, a simple price update rule leads to rapid convergence toward the equilibrium. In particular, this paper considers a Fisher market repeated over an unbounded number of time steps, with the addition of finite sized warehouses to enable non-equilibrium trade. The main result is that suitable tatonnement style price updates lead to convergence in a significant subset of markets satisfying the Weak Gross Substitutes property. Throughout this process the warehouse are always able to store or meet demand imbalances…
Market equilibria of matching markets offer an intuitive and fair solution for matching problems without money with agents who have preferences over the items. Such a matching market can be viewed as a variation of Fisher market, albeit with rather peculiar preferences of agents. These preferences can be described by piece-wise linear concave (PLC) functions, which however, are not separable (due to each agent only asking for one item), are not monotone, and do not satisfy the gross substitute property-- increase in price of an item can result in increased demand for the item. Devanur and Kann…
In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing social welfare in combinatorial markets through pricing schemes. We consider the existence of prices that are capable to achieve optimal social welfare without a central tie-breaking coordinator. In the case of two buyers with rank valuations, we give polynomial-time algorithms that always find such prices when one of the matroids is a simple partition matroid or both matroids are strongly base orderable. This result partially answers a question raised by Düetting and Végh in 2017. We further formalize a weighted variant of the conjecture of Dü…
The endowment effect, coined by Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler, posits that people tend to inflate the value of items they own. This bias was studied, both theoretically and empirically, with respect to a single item. Babaioff et al. [EC'18] took a first step at extending this study beyond a single item. They proposed a specific formulation of the endowment effect in combinatorial settings, and showed that equilibrium existence with respect to the endowed valuations extends from gross substitutes to submodular valuations, but provably fails to extend to XOS valuations. Extending the endowment e…
Central results in economics guarantee the existence of efficient equilibria for various classes of markets. An underlying assumption in early work is that agents are price-takers, i.e., agents honestly report their true demand in response to prices. A line of research in economics, initiated by Hurwicz (1972), is devoted to understanding how such markets perform when agents are strategic about their demands. This is captured by the \emph{Walrasian Mechanism} that proceeds by collecting reported demands, finding clearing prices in the \emph{reported} market via an ascending price tâtonnement p…
We study approximation algorithms for revenue maximization based on static item pricing, where a seller chooses prices for various goods in the market, and then the buyers purchase utility-maximizing bundles at these given prices. We formulate two somewhat general techniques for designing good pricing algorithms for this setting: Price Doubling and Item Halving. Using these techniques, we unify many of the existing results in the item pricing literature under a common framework, as well as provide several new item pricing algorithms for approximating both revenue and social welfare. More speci…
We design a simple ascending-price algorithm to compute a $(1+\varepsilon)$-approximate equilibrium in Arrow-Debreu exchange markets with weak gross substitute (WGS) property, which runs in time polynomial in market parameters and $\log 1/\varepsilon$. This is the first polynomial-time algorithm for most of the known tractable classes of Arrow-Debreu markets, which is easy to implement and avoids heavy machinery such as the ellipsoid method. In addition, our algorithm can be applied in unknown market setting without exact knowledge about the number of agents, their individual utilities and end…
We study the power and limits of optimal dynamic pricing in combinatorial markets; i.e., dynamic pricing that leads to optimal social welfare. Previous work by Cohen-Addad et al. [EC'16] demonstrated the existence of optimal dynamic prices for unit-demand buyers, and showed a market with coverage valuations that admits no such prices. However, finding the frontier of markets (i.e., valuation functions) that admit optimal dynamic prices remains an open problem. In this work we establish positive and negative results that narrow the existing gap. On the positive side, we provide tools for handli…
