TITLE: Understanding the power and limitations of clock auctions

ABSTRACT: In this presentation, we will be focusing on the class of (deferred-acceptance) clock auctions, introduced by economists Paul Milgrom and Ilya Segal. Clock auctions satisfy a sequence of impressive properties: i) they areobviously strategyproof, which implies that it is very easy for the participating bidders to identify their optimal strategy, ii) they are weakly group-strategyproof, which guarantees that even the bidders collude, they cannot manipulate the auction, iii) they are transparent and do not require that the bidders trust the auctioneer, and iv) they satisfy unconditional winner privacy, which means that the winners of the auction do not need to reveal their true value. This unique combination of benefits that clock auctions provide make them ideal for real-world problems, since they require very little from the participating bidders. Our presentation will first discuss these properties in detail, it will then study the extent to which clock auctions can match the state-of-the-art performance guarantees of previously known auctions (proving both positive and negative results), and will conclude with a discussion of some open problems and future directions.