@inproceedings{goldberg2003envy-free,
author = {Goldberg, Andrew and Hartline, Jason D.},
title = {Envy-Free Auctions for Digital Goods},
booktitle = {ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC '03)},
year = {2003},
month = {June},
abstract = {We study auctions for a commodity in unlimited supply, e.g., a digital good. In particular we consider three desirable properties for auctions: - Competitive: the auction achieves a constant fraction of the optimal revenue even on worst case inputs. - Truthful: any bidder's best strategy is to bid the maximum value they are willing to pay. - Envy-free: after the auction is run, no bidder would be happier with the outcome of another bidder (for unlimited supply auctions, this means that there is a single sale price and goods are allocated to all bidders willing to pay this price). Our main result is to show that no constant-competitive truthful auction is envy-free. We consider two relaxations of these requirements, allowing the auction to be untruthful with vanishingly small probability, and allowing the auction to give non-envy-free outcomes with vanishingly small probability. Under both of these relaxations we get competitive auctions.},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.},
url = {http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/research/publication/envy-free-auctions-for-digital-goods/},
edition = {ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC '03)},
}