Economic Coordination, Bundled Goods, and the Impact of Complementarities

. The allocation of a set of resources to a set of agents is studied. The agents may express preferences for complementary use of goods. It is assumed that the agents are self-interested. A procedure to compute fair, competitive prices is suggested. The prices may be used to elicit honest preference. This allows to solve the allocation problem optimally in most cases. Finally, the applicability of the approach is discussed. 1 Introduction The efficient allocation of resources is still a problem of significant practical relevance. The "virtualisation" of processes and companies; the increasing importance of integration along supply-chains 1 ; company mergers resulting in distributed and often loosely coupled units--all call for efficient and controllable mechanisms to coordinate the interests of the participating agents. An important source of coordination requirements is the allocation of resources. Although related through a contractual framework, the agents in the examples above c..