Designing Auctions: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

Auction is a form of organization of competition that leads to the assignment and valuation of resources based on the information obtained from the competing agents. From the perspective of systems science it is a distributed resource allocation algorithm applied in the environment with information asymmetry, i.e., where the interconnected and interacting subsystems have different information about the system as a whole. This paper presents an overview of the historical development of mathematical theory underlying modern approach to auction design. Selected practical applications of the theory are also discussed.