Characterization of Vickrey auction with reserve price for multiple objects (Q6086124)

It is known that reserve pricing at auctions is an important method of ensuring that the seller revenue is not too low. This article characterizes Vickrey auction with reserve price (VARP), in single and multiple objects settings, using normative and strategic axioms. More precisely, the authors describe the idea of mechanisms being immune to manipulation by invoking the concept of strategyproofness. A mechanism is said to be strategyproof if truth-telling is a weakly dominant strategy for all agents in the direct revelation game induced by it. In particular, it provides a new interpretation of reserve price as the infimum of a particular set of non-negative real numbers. In the single object case, the authors find that a strategyproof mechanism satisfies anonymity in welfare, agent sovereignty and non-bossiness in decision if and only if it has a VARP allocation rule and extend this result to the multiple objects setting by introducing a continuity condition, and showing that any reasonable sale procedure (fixed prior to the realization of the number of available objects) involving continuous and strategyproof mechanisms that satisfy the aforementioned properties: must always use VARP with a fixed reserve price. Section 2 presents the model and definitions. Section 3 presents the results on single and multiple objects. Section 4 discusses the independence of axioms. Section 5 discusses weakening of some of the axioms. Finally, Section 6 contains concluding remarks. Proofs are relegated to the appendix.