Staged Auction Topic Catalog

Canonical folder topic: auction

Subtopics

• auction.basic - auction formats, bid profiles, ordered-bid utilities, Vickrey (second-price) and first-price sealed-bid mechanisms.
• auction.knapsack - binary allocations, welfare maximization, relaxations, and dynamic programming.
• auction.bayesian - Bayesian single-item auction framework (CDF/density, opponent priors), interim quantities and IC, MSZ Chapter 12 blueprint stubs (Dutch/English equivalences, symmetric IPV equilibria for first- price and all-pay, entry fee and reserve price analysis, risk-aversion comparisons).
• auction.online - online single-item (posted-price) auction where bidders arrive sequentially and the posted price may depend only on prior bids: the OnlineAlgorithm embedding, DSIC of truthful bidding, the impossibility of a constant deterministic competitive ratio, and the secretary-style 1/4-competitive welfare guarantee under uniformly random arrival (Roughgarden, Twenty Lectures, Problem 2.1).

Source Guidance

• Use [Krishna 2010] Vijay Krishna, Auction Theory, 2nd ed., for private-value auctions, first-price and second-price auctions, revenue equivalence, interdependent values, collusion, multiple-object auctions, packages, positions, and auction-specific mechanism design.
• Use [MSZ Chapter 12] Maschler, Solan, and Zamir, Game Theory, for the IPV / Bayesian-equilibrium track and for the strategic equivalences (Dutch≡FP, English≡SP under IPV).

Boundary

Put general truthfulness, transfer interfaces, Myerson optimal-auction machinery, revenue equivalence, reserve-price characterisations, and the selling-problem framework under mechanism_design. The auction topic covers concrete auction formats (single-item, multi-item, knapsack, Bayesian single-item) and their format-specific equilibrium and DSIC results.