Combinatorial Diffusion Auction Design

Abstract

Diffusion auction design for combinatorial settings is a long-standing challenge. One difficulty is that we cannot directly extend the solutions for simpler settings to combinatorial settings (like extending the Vickrey auction to VCG in the traditional settings). In this paper, we propose a different approach to leverage the diffusion auctions for single-item settings. We design a combinatorial diffusion auction framework which can use any desirable single-item diffusion auction to produce a combinatorial auction to satisfy incentive compatibility (IC), individual rationality (IR), and weak budget balance (WBB).