Optimal auction design

Myerson, R. B. (1981). Optimal auction design. Mathematics of Operations Ressearch, 6(l) 58-73. 

David C Parkes. Optimal auction design for agents with hard valuation problems. In Proc. IJCAI-99 Workshop on Agent Mediated Electronic Commerce, pages 206-219, July 1999. Stockholm. 

Product Specification A big challenge that customized auction makers face in delivering to their customer a successful sourcing experience is understanding the buyer s specifications, its effect on the potential supplier market and the optimal auction design. The bulk of the auction literature examines auctions in an environment where the product is standard and well-identified and... 

Myerson [65] first introduced the problem of optimal mechanism design, in the context of an auction for a single item with a seller that seeks to maximize her expected revenue. We will provide a general formulation of the optimal mechanism design problem, to parallel the formulation of the efficient mechanism design problem. However, analytic solutions to the optimal mechanism design problem are known only for special cases. 

Given these objections to one-shot combinatorial auctions there has been considerable interest in the design of iterative combinatorial auctions, which can reduce the valuation work required by agents because optimal strategies must only be computed along the equilibrium path of the auction. 

Auctions in Supply Chains An additional complicating factor in B2B auctions is that buyers and sellers typically interact across multiple channels in the supply chain. For example, a supplier may sell to a distributor (the buyer in the auction) as well as compete with the distributor in selling to the final customers. To the best of our knowledge, the research in auction theory has ignored the competing interests of different echelons in a supply chain, and its effect on the optimal design and performance of an auction. 

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