An approach to vickrey-based resource allocation in the presence of monopolistic sellers

Abstract

Market-based approaches proposed recently proved to be promising for competitive resource sharing in peer-to-peer and grid computing. Many approaches leverage on the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to achieve incentive compatibility which embraces truthful bidding of participating agents. This paper addresses a deciency of VCG that to the best of our knowledge has not been studied. When one or more agents possess a large portion of the market share of resource, a monopoly situation arises. Applying VCG mechanism does not lead to an allocation because the second price cannot be mathematically determined. Using both theoretical and simulation analysis, we show the importance of addressing this problem. Our results show that monopoly situation arises in many types of market settings, from auction to exchange, and with a relatively high occurrence rate. To address this, we propose a new pricing method suitable for many market settings that achieve budget balanced and economic efficiency but relax the strategy proof property. © 2009, Australian Computer Society, Inc.