The Communication Complexity of Combinatorial Auctions in Graphs

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George Christodoulou, Elias Koutsoupias, Annamária Kovács, Ioannis Vlachos

Published: 25 Feb 2026, Last Modified: 06 May 2026STACS 2026EveryoneCC BY 4.0
Abstract: We study truthful and non-truthful protocols for combinatorial auctions in which every item can be allocated to one of two agents (multigraphs), or more generally to a fixed number of agents (hypergraphs). We show some tight – both positive and impossibility – results for the communication complexity of approximating the optimal social welfare for general monotone, subadditive, or XOS valuations.