This book presents two experimental studies that deal with the comparison of multi-item auction designs for two specific applications: the sale of 2.6 GHz radio spectrum rights in Europe, and the sale of emissions permits in Australia. In order to tackle the complexity of these experiments, a cognitively based toolkit is proposed, including modularized video instructions, comprehension tests, a learning platform, a graphical one-screen user interface, and comprehension-based group matching.

Nowadays, engineering large-scale software systems means dealing with complex systems composed of pervasive software components that move around and adapt to nondeterministic and open environments, like the Internet, in order to achieve systems design goals through the coordination of autonomously distributed services. The agent metaphor, in particular software agents and multi-agent systems (MAS), constitutes a promising approach for covering most of the software development life cycle, from conceptual modeling and requirements specification to architectural definition, design, and implementation. This book presents 17 carefully reviewed papers arranged in order to provide a coherent survey of how to exploit agent properties and MAS issues in today's software systems. The book offers the following topical sections: - software engineering foundations - requirements engineering and software architecture - coordination and mobility - reuse -dependability -empirical studies and applications

This book contains invited essays in memory of Leonid Hurwicz spanning a large area of economic, social and other sciences where the implementation or enforcement of institutions and rules requires the design of effective mechanisms. The foundations of these articles are set by social choice concepts; game theory; Nash, Bayesian and Walrasian equilibria; complete and incomplete information. Besides in-depth treatments of well-established parts of mechanism and implementation theory, contributions on novel directions deal, for instance, with a quantum approach to game and decision making under uncertainty; digitalization; and the design of block chain for trading. The outstanding competence and reputation of the authors reflect the appreciation of the fundamental contributions and the lasting admiration of the personality and the work of Leonid Hurwicz.

When a bid is placed on a package in a combinatorial auction (CA), the bid value must be large enough to ensure that the package remains in contention for inclusion in winning combinations in future. The Deadness Level (DL) of a package can serve as an ask price on a fresh bid that can be meaningfully placed on it. Package DL values in single-unit CAs are readily determined. In recent years, however, interest in multi-unit CAs has grown rapidly. The number of packages can be very large in this case, and bidders need greater guidance in estimating valuations. But the DL value of a package tends to creep upwards unsteadily as more bids are placed, and no closed form expression or computational method has been found for it as yet. Here we present for the first time an exact method for determining package DLs in the multi-unit case, assuming that an OR bidding language is being used. A dynamic programming implementation is described that enables fast incremental computations of ask prices after each bid. Experimental runs on simulated data and live data from a recent U.K. multi-unit spectrum auction show that the memory requirement is not excessive. Thus the proposed method could help to promote bidder participation in online multi-unit eBay-like CAs in the procurement and sale of commodities.

This book provides a comprehensive introduction to modern auction theory and its important new applications. It is written by a leading economic theorist whose suggestions guided the creation of the new spectrum auction designs. Aimed at graduate students and professionals in economics, the book gives the most up-to-date treatments of both traditional theories of 'optimal auctions' and newer theories of multi-unit auctions and package auctions, and shows by example how these theories are used. The analysis explores the limitations of prominent older designs, such as the Vickrey auction design, and evaluates the practical responses to those limitations. It explores the tension between the traditional theory of auctions with a fixed set of bidders, in which the seller seeks to squeeze as much revenue as possible from the fixed set, and the theory of auctions with endogenous entry, in which bidder profits must be respected to encourage participation.