Technical Report 2005-011

A Flexible Model for Tree-Structured Multi-Commodity Markets

Per Carlsson and Arne Andersson

April 2005

Abstract:

In this paper we study tree-structured multi-commodity, multi-unit markets. The concept is a way to handle dependencies between commodities on the market in a tractable way. The winner determination problem of a general combinatorial market is well known to be NP-hard.

It has been shown that on single-unit single-sided combinatorial auctions with tree-structured bundles the problem can be computed in polynomial time. We show that it is possible to extend this to multi-unit double-sided markets. Further it is possible to handle the commodities of a bundle not only as complements but as perfect substitutes too. Under certain conditions the computation time is still polynomial.

Note: Extended version of conference paper accepted for IEEE CEC2005, München, July 2005

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