Online auction

An online auction (also electronic auction, e-auction, virtual auction, or eAuction) is an auction held over the internet and accessed by internet connected devices. Similar to in-person auctions, online auctions come in a variety of types, with different bidding and selling rules. eCommerce sales for businesses have been steadily increasing for years, and with the migration of virtually all transactions to digital due to the COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide sales through ecommerce channels such as websites and online marketplaces increased overall in 2020 and beyond. There are two primary markets for online auctions: business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C). B2C is forecast to have over a 1% annual growth rate, achieving a nearly 22% share of total global retail sales by 2024. B2B ecommerce gross merchandise value showed a similarly steady rate through 2019, as to mirror its retail B2C counterpart. The largest consumer-to-consumer online auction site is eBay, which re

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No-Regret Learning from Partially Observed Data in Repeated Auctions

Orcun Karaca

We study a general class of repeated auctions, such as the ones found in electricity markets, as multi-agent games between the bidders. In such a repeated setting, bidders can adapt their strategies online using no-regret algorithms based on the data observed in the previous auction rounds. Well-studied no-regret algorithms depend on the feedback information available at every round, and can be mainly distinguished as bandit (or payoff-based), and full-information. However, the information structure found in auctions lies in between these two models, since participants can often obtain partial observations of their utilities under different strategies. To this end, we modify existing bandit algorithms to exploit such additional information. Specifically, we utilize the feedback information that bidders can obtain when their bids are not accepted, and build a more accurate estimator of the utility vector. This results in improved regret guarantees compared to standard bandit algorithms. Moreover, we propose a heuristic method for auction settings where the proposed algorithm is not directly applicable. Finally, we demonstrate our findings on case studies based on realistic electricity market models.

2020

Exploiting Weak Supermodularity for Coalition-Proof Mechanisms

Orcun Karaca

Under the incentive-compatible Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism, coalitions of participants can influence the auction to obtain higher collective profit. These manipulations were proven to be eliminated if and only if the market objective is supermodular. Nevertheless, several auctions do not satisfy the stringent conditions for supermodularity. These auctions include electricity markets, which are the main motivation of our paper. To address this issue, we introduce the supermodularity ratio and the weak supermodularity. We show that these concepts provide us with tight bounds on the profitability of collusion and shill bidding. We then derive an analytical lower bound on the supermodularity ratio. Our results are verified with case studies based on the IEEE test systems.

IEEE2018

McGraw-Hill2003

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Auction

An auction is usually a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bids, taking bids, and then selling the item to the highest bidder or buying the item from the lowest b

E-commerce

E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, elec

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The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of net