Diffusion Multi-unit Auctions with Diminishing Marginal Utility Buyers

Haolin Liu, Xinyuan Lian, Dengji Zhao

Abstract: We consider an auction design problem where a seller sells multiple homogeneous items to a set of connected buyers. Each buyer only knows the buyers she directly connects with, and the seller initially only connects to a few buyers. Our goal is to design an auction to incentivize the buyers who are aware of the market to invite their neighbors to join the auction. Meanwhile, the auction should also guarantee that the seller never runs a deficit. In this paper, we design the very first multi-unit diffusion auction that satisfies all these properties for buyers with diminishing marginal utility.