This paper provides an elementary, non‐technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing
and describing some of the critical papers in the subject.(The most important of these are …

February 2000 was a stressful month for me: the UK 3G auction was about to begin. For over
two years I had been working with the UK government to design the world's first auction of …

Auctions often involve the sale of many related goods: Treasury, spectrum, and electricity
auctions are examples. In multi-unit auctions, bids for marginal units may affect payments for …

When bidders exhibit multi-unit demands, standard auction methods generally yield
inefficient outcomes. This article proposes a new ascending-bid auction for homogeneous …

We initiate the study of efficient mechanism design with guaranteed good properties even
when players participate in multiple mechanisms simultaneously or sequentially. We define …

We analyze an exchange economy in which (i) all commodities except money are
indivisible,(ii) agents' preferences can be described by a reservation value for each bundle …

Abstract Systems wherein strategic agents compete for limited resources are ubiquitous: the
economy, computer networks, social networks, congestion networks, nature, etc. Assuming …

We study assignment problems where individuals trade packages consisting of several,
rather than single, objects. Although buyers' reservations values are non-additive, efficient …

We consider a manufacturer who uses a reverse, or procurement, auction to determine
which supplier will be awarded a contract. Each bid consists of a price and a set of nonprice …

This survey outlines a general and modular theory for proving approximation guarantees for
equilibria of auctions in complex settings. This theory complements traditional economic …