A bluffer’s guide to auctions

There is a veritable menagerie of auctions — single dimensional, multidimensional, single sided, double sided, first price, second price, English, Dutch, Japanese, sealed bid — and these have been extensively discussed and analysed in the economics literature. The main purpose of this paper is to survey this literature from a computer science perspective, primarily from the viewpoint of computer scientists who are interested in learning about auction theory, and to provide pointers into the economics literature for those who want a deeper technical understanding. In addition, since auctions are an increasingly important topic in computer science, we also look at work on auctions from the computer science literature. Overall, our aim is to identifying what both these bodies of work these tell us about creating electronic auctions