Equilibrium Learning in Combinatorial Auctions: Computing Approximate Bayesian Nash Equilibria via Pseudogradient Dynamics
Applications of combinatorial auctions (CA) as market mechanisms are prevalent in practice, yet their Bayesian Nash equilibria (BNE) remain poorly understood. Analytical solutions are known only for a few cases where the problem can be reformulated as a tractable partial differential equation (PDE). In the general case, finding BNE is known to be computationally hard. Previous work on numerical computation of BNE in auctions has relied either on solving such PDEs explicitly, calculating pointwise best-responses in strategy space, or iteratively solving restricted subgames. In this study, we present a generic yet scalable alternative multi-agent equilibrium learning method that represents strategies as neural networks and applies policy iteration based on gradient dynamics in self-play. Most auctions are ex-post nondifferentiable, so gradients may be unavailable or misleading, and we rely on suitable pseudogradient estimates instead. Although it is well-known that gradient dynamics cannot guarantee convergence to NE in general, we observe fast and robust convergence to approximate BNE in a wide variety of auctions and present a sufficient condition for convergence
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Fair Combinatorial Auction for Blockchain Trade Intents: Being Fair without Knowing What is Fair
Blockchain trade intent auctions currently intermediate approximately USD 5 billion monthly. Due to production complementarities, the auction is combinatorial: when multiple trade intents from different traders are aucti…
FairnessPackage Bids in Combinatorial Electricity Auctions: Selection, Welfare Losses, and Alternatives
A key challenge in combinatorial auctions is designing bid formats that accurately capture agents' preferences while remaining computationally feasible. This is especially true for electricity auctions, where complex pre…
A Bayesian Clearing Mechanism for Combinatorial Auctions
We cast the problem of combinatorial auction design in a Bayesian framework in order to incorporate prior information into the auction process and minimize the number of rounds to convergence. We first develop a generati…
$k$th price auctions and Catalan numbers
This paper establishes an interesting link between $k$th price auctions and Catalan numbers by showing that for distributions that have linear density, the bid function at any symmetric, increasing equilibrium of a $k$th…
Learning in Auctions: Regret is Hard, Envy is Easy
A line of recent work provides welfare guarantees of simple combinatorial auction formats, such as selling m items via simultaneous second price auctions (SiSPAs) (Christodoulou et al. 2008, Bhawalkar and Roughgarden 201…