Abstract

There is interest in designing simultaneous auctions for situations in which the value of assets to a bidder depends upon which other assets he or she wins. In such cases, bidders may well wish to submit bids for combinations of assets. When this is allowed, the problem of determining the revenue maximizing set of nonconflicting bids can be a difficult one. We analyze this problem, identifying several different structures of combinatorial bids for which computational tractability is constructively demonstrated and some structures for which computational tractability 1 Introduction Some auctions sell many assets simultaneously. Often these assets, like U.S. treasury bills, are interchangeable. However, sometimes the assets and the bids for them are distinct. This happens frequently, as in the U.S. Department of the Interior's simultaneous sales of off-shore oil leases, in some private farm land auctions, and in the Federal Communications Commission's recent multi-billion dollar sales...

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