{"id":147954,"date":"2003-06-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-06-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/envy-free-auctions-for-digital-goods\/"},"modified":"2018-10-16T20:29:54","modified_gmt":"2018-10-17T03:29:54","slug":"envy-free-auctions-for-digital-goods","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/envy-free-auctions-for-digital-goods\/","title":{"rendered":"Envy-Free Auctions for Digital Goods"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>We study auctions for a commodity in unlimited supply, e.g., a digital good. In particular we consider three desirable properties for auctions: &#8211; Competitive: the auction achieves a constant fraction of the optimal revenue even on worst case inputs. &#8211; Truthful: any bidder&#8217;s best strategy is to bid the maximum value they are willing to pay. &#8211; 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.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We study auctions for a commodity in unlimited supply, e.g., a digital good. In particular we consider three desirable properties for auctions: &#8211; Competitive: the auction achieves a constant fraction of the optimal revenue even on worst case inputs. &#8211; Truthful: any bidder&#8217;s best strategy is to bid the maximum value they are willing to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13554],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-147954","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-human-computer-interaction","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.","msr_edition":"ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC '03)","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2003-06-01","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"227635","msr_publicationurl":"http:\/\/www.acm.org\/","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","title":"ec03-simple-auctions.pdf","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2003\/06\/ec03-simple-auctions.pdf","id":227635,"label_id":0},{"type":"url","title":"http:\/\/www.acm.org\/","viewUrl":false,"id":false,"label_id":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[{"id":0,"url":"http:\/\/www.acm.org\/"},{"id":227635,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2003\/06\/ec03-simple-auctions.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"goldberg","user_id":31898,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=goldberg"},{"type":"text","value":"Jason D. 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