Seminar by Dr. Mukesh Mohania
Maximizing Realized Revenue in a Web-based Dutch Auction
Dr. Mukesh Mohania
IBM India Research Laboratory
IIT Delhi campus, Hauz Khas, New Delhi
Date: Thursday, January 16, 2003
Time: 03:45 PM
Venue: CS-101
Abstract
We describe a method for maximizing the realized revenue in a web-based Dutch auction. The specific form of the Dutch auction we consider is one in which all winning bidders purchase their specified number of units of an item at the lowest winning bid price. Such an auction typically has fierce bidding competition amongst bidders whose bids are near the present lowest winning bid price. Motivated by the observation that the overall revenue realized by the auctioneer in such an auction is determined by only the lowest winning bid price, we propose a method that attempts to increase the lowest winning bid price. Our method relies on a coupon which may be issued at an automatically determined point in the auction and whose face value is non-decreasing. The coupon can be used by any participant and discounts the actual price paid by a bidder using the coupon by the face value of the coupon. Since the probability of a bidder using a coupon is directly dependent on the proximity of his or her bid to the present lowest winning price, bidders with valuations near the present lowest winning price are thus more likely to use the coupon and displace some of the present winning bidders. The displaced winning bidders can then also increase their bids, perhaps also by using the coupon, thereby raising the lowest winning bid price. A computational approach is used to determine if and when a coupon should be issued, the face value of the coupon and possible revisions to the face value of the coupon based on bidders response.
About the Speaker
Mukesh Mohania received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay in 1995. He worked in Univ of Melbourne and in Univ of South Australia from 1995 to 1999. Currently, he is a Research Staff Member at IBM India Research Lab, Delhi, and manages a database group. He has worked in the areas of distributed databases, data warehousing, semistructured databases, and autonomic computing. He has published more than 60 research papers in these areas. He was awarded Technical Achievement Award in the area of Web Database Management and Data Warehousing by Association of Database and Expert Systems Applications in Greenwich, U.K., 2000. He is also a IEEE senior member.