Abstract: We study the following Bayesian setting: mitems are sold to nselfish bidders in mindependent second-price auctions. Each bidder has a privatevaluation function that expresses complex preferences over allsubsets of items. Bidders only have beliefsabout the valuation functions of the other bidders, in the form of probability distributions. The objective is to allocate the items to the bidders in a way that provides a good approximation to the optimal social welfare value. We show that if bidders have submodular valuation functions, then every Bay...
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Topics: 
Mathematical economics
Microeconomics
Mathematical optimization