A New Approach to Auctions and Resilient Mechanism Design

Abstract

We put forward a new approach to mechanism design, and exemplify it via a new mechanism guaranteeing significant revenue in unrestricted combinatorial auctions. Our mechanism (1) succeeds in a new and very adversarial collusion model; (2) works in a new, equilibrium-less, and very strong solution concept; (3) benchmarks its performance against the knowledge that the players have about each other; (4) is computationally efficient and preserves the players’ privacy to an unusual extent.