Ascending-Price Mechanism for General Multi-sided Markets

Dvir Gilor, Rica Gonen, Erel Segal-Halevi

Abstract: We present an ascending-price mechanism for a multi-sided market with a variety of participants, such as manufacturers, logistics agents, insurance providers, and assemblers. Each deal in the market may consist of a combination of agents from separate categories, and different such combinations are simultaneously allowed. This flexibility lets multiple intersecting markets be resolved as a single global market. Our mechanism is obviously-truthful, strongly budget-balanced, individually rational, and attains almost the optimal gain-from-trade when the market is sufficiently large. We evaluate the performance of the suggested mechanism with experiments on real stock market data and synthetically produced data.