SBBA: a Strongly-Budget-Balanced Double-Auction Mechanism

Abstract

In a seminal paper, McAfee (1992) presented the first dominant strategy truthful mechanism for double auction. His mechanism attains nearly optimal gain-from-trade when the market is sufficiently large. However, his mechanism may leave money on the table, since the price paid by the buyers may be higher than the price paid to the sellers. This money is included in the gain-from-trade and in some cases it accounts for almost all the gain-from-trade, leaving almost no gain-from-trade to the traders. We present SBBA: a variant of McAfee's mechanism which is strongly budget-balanced. There is a single price, all money is exchanged between buyers and sellers and no money is left on the table. This means that all gain-from-trade is enjoyed by the traders. We generalize this variant to spatially-distributed markets with transit costs.