Competitive Auctions for Multiple Digital Goods

Competitive auctions encourage consumers to bid their utility values while achieving revenue close to that of fixed pricing with perfect market analysis. These auctions were introduced in [6] in the context of selling an unlimited number of copies of a single item (e.g., rights to watch a movie broadcast). In this paper we study the case of multiple items (e.g., concurrent broadcast of several movies). We show auctions that are competitive for this case. The underlying auction mechanisms are more sophisticated than in the single item case, and require solving an interesting optimization problem. Our results are based on a sampling problem that may have other applications.