Designing Core-Selecting Payment Rules: A Computational Search Approach
针对组合拍卖中支付规则设计的难题，提出计算搜索框架，发现大型风格规则在效率、激励和收入上优于常用的二次规则，并推荐两种规则替代现有做法。
Combinatorial auctions are regularly used to allocate resources worth billions of dollars. However, finding optimal payment rules for such auctions is still an open problem. To this end, we develop a new computational search framework for finding payment rules with desirable properties. We show that the rule most commonly used in practice, the quadratic rule, can be improved upon in terms of efficiency, incentives and revenue. Our best-performing rules are so-called large-style rules—that is, they provide better incentives to bidders with larger values. Ultimately, we identify two particularly well-performing rules and suggest that they be considered for practical implementation in place of the currently used rule.