We study a multi-unit auction with multiple bidders, each of whom has a private valuation and a budget. The truthful mechanisms of such an auction are characterized, in the sense that, under standard assumptions, we prove that it is impossible to design a non-trivial truthful auction which allocates all units, while we provide the design of an asymptotically revenue-maximizing truthful mechanism which may allocate only some of the units. Our asymptotic parameter is a budget dominance parameter which measures the size of the budget of a single agent relative to the maximum revenue. We discuss the relevance of these results for the design of Internet ad auctions.

This article studies scoring auctions, a procedure commonly used to buy differentiated products. suppliers submit offers on all dimensions of the good (price, level ofnonmonetary attributes), and these are evaluated using a scoring rule. We provide a systematic analysis of equilibrium behavior in scoring auctions when suppliers 'private information is multidimensional (characterization of equilibrium behavior and expected utility equivalence). In addition, we show that scoring auctions dominate several other commonly used procedures for buying differentiated products, including menu auctions, beauty contests, and price-only auctions with minimum quality thresholds. 1.

This dissertation studies mechanism design for various combinatorial problems in the presence of strategic agents. A mechanism is an algorithm for allocating a resource among a group of participants, each of which has a privately-known value for any particular allocation. A mechanism is truthful if it is in each participant’s best interest to reveal his private information truthfully regardless of the strategies of the other participants. First, we explore a competitive auction framework for truthful mechanism design in the setting of multi-unit auctions, or auctions which sell multiple identical copies of a good. In this framework, the goal is to design a truthful auction whose revenue approximates that of an omniscient auction for any set of bids. We focus on two natural settings — the limited demand setting where bidders desire at most a fixed number of copies and the limited budget setting where bidders can spend at most a fixed amount of money. In the limit demand setting, all prior auctions employed the use of randomization in the computation of the allocation and prices. Randomization