Approximations to auctions of digital goods with share-averse bidders

摘要

We consider the case of a digital product for share-averse bidders, where the product can be sold to multiple buyers who experience some disutility from other firms or consumers owning the same product. We model the problem of selling a digital product to share-averse bidders as an auction and apply a Bayesian optimal mechanism design. We also design constant-approximation algorithms in the prior-free setting including both average- and worst-case analyses. (C) 2013 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.