TY - GEN
T1 - Optimal auctions for correlated buyers with sampling
AU - Fu, Hu
AU - Haghpanah, Nima
AU - Hartline, Jason
AU - Kleinberg, Robert
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - Crémer and McLean [1985] showed that, when buyers' valuations are drawn from a correlated distribution, an auction with full knowledge on the distribution can extract the full social surplus. We study whether this phenomenon persists when the auctioneer has only incomplete knowledge of the distribution, represented by a finite family of candidate distributions, and has sample access to the real distribution. We show that the naive approach which uses samples to distinguish candidate distributions may fail, whereas an extended version of the Crémer-McLean auction simultaneously extracts full social surplus under each candidate distribution. With an algebraic argument, we give a tight bound on the number of samples needed by this auction, which is the difference between the number of candidate distributions and the dimension of the linear space they span.
AB - Crémer and McLean [1985] showed that, when buyers' valuations are drawn from a correlated distribution, an auction with full knowledge on the distribution can extract the full social surplus. We study whether this phenomenon persists when the auctioneer has only incomplete knowledge of the distribution, represented by a finite family of candidate distributions, and has sample access to the real distribution. We show that the naive approach which uses samples to distinguish candidate distributions may fail, whereas an extended version of the Crémer-McLean auction simultaneously extracts full social surplus under each candidate distribution. With an algebraic argument, we give a tight bound on the number of samples needed by this auction, which is the difference between the number of candidate distributions and the dimension of the linear space they span.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84903195588&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1145/2600057.2602895
DO - 10.1145/2600057.2602895
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84903195588
SN - 9781450325653
T3 - EC 2014 - Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
SP - 23
EP - 35
BT - EC 2014 - Proceedings of the 15th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 15th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation, EC 2014
Y2 - 22 February 2015 through 12 June 2014
ER -