No abstract available.

Combinatoric auctions sell K objects to N people who have preferences defined on subsets of the items. The optimal auction satisfies incentive compatibility (it is a dominant strategy to report true values), voluntary participation (bidders are not worse off through participation) and maximizes the expected revenue of the auctioneer among such auctions. In this paper, the optmal auction is characterized for the special case of single-minded bidders. It is shown that the optimal auction is not a Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism. The optimal auction uses pivot prices, as in VCG, but it also uses bidder preferences. An example is provided showing improvement over the VCG mechanism can be large. The example also illustrates that auctions that are efficient or in the core are not optimal.

BabyBondConnect (BBC) is a software package for trading goods with combined-value in a call market. The software was developed at Caltech under the direction of Dr. John O. Ledyard.The poster session will explain in detail the problem of trading combined-value goods, the mechanism used by BBC, and the technical specification of the software package. The poster will suggest further development of the BBC software package, the role software engineering and experimental economics can play in understanding traditional markets and electronic markets, and how new market mechanisms can be developed and tested.

No abstract available.