MUDA: A Truthful Multi-Unit Double-Auction Mechanism

In a seminal paper, McAfee (1992) presented a truthful mechanism for double auctions, attaining asymptoticallyoptimal gain-from-trade without any prior information on the valuations of the traders. McAfee’s mechanism handles single-parametric agents, allowing each seller to sell a single unit and each buyer to buy a single unit. This paper presents a double-auction mechanism that handles multi-parametric agents and allows multiple units per trader, as long as the valuation functions of all traders have decreasing marginal returns. The mechanism is prior-free, ex-post individually-rational, dominant-strategy truthful and strongly-budget-balanced. Its gain-from-trade approaches the optimum when the market size is sufficiently large.

Authors

• Erel Segal-Halevi Ariel University
• Avinatan Hassidim Bar-Ilan University, Israel Google, Israel
• Yonatan Aumann Bar-Ilan University

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