上海科技大学知识管理系统

Taking social connections into consideration has recently been recognized in auction mechanism design. The key challenge is that buyers are competitors, and we need to design proper mechanisms to incentivize existing buyers to invite their neighbors to participate in the auction. For selling a single item, many mechanisms have been designed to achieve various objectives, such as Sybil-proofness, decentralization, and improving the seller’s revenue. However, these works are rather complex and lack a unified methodological understanding, making it difficult to follow and extend them.

In this paper, we study existing mechanisms from a transformation perspective and propose a novel framework. We demonstrate that all mechanisms within this framework effectively encourage buyers to diffuse the auction information to others. Leveraging this framework, we can tailor specific mechanisms to achieve diverse objectives and easily find variant mechanisms. We present two mechanisms as illustrative examples: one achieves the property called incentive for early arrival, and the other showcases its Sybil-proof property and applicability in decentralized settings.