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"New kind of auction balances supply, demand and complex bidding strategies," by Philip Ball. Nature Science Update, 30 July 2003.
Ball writes about two discoveries in auction theory. The first is in the field of combinatorial auctions, in which what a bidder offers for an item may hinge upon such things as whether the bidder purchases another item or on what price the bidder has paid for the item. Although an optimal result usually is hard to find for such auctions, David Porter and colleagues present an efficient combinatorial auction design in "Combinatorial auction design" published July 31 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The second discovery involves online auctions. Albert-László Barabási and colleagues have determined that online auctions that allow an individual to make many simultaneous bids are unfair when compared to conventional auctions. The ability to make a vast number of bids increases the bidder's chance to pay less while shutting out those who bid on only one item. This research appears in "Emerging behavior in electronic bidding" in the July issue of Physical Review E.
--- Mike Breen
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