Market clearing price and equilibria of the progressive second price mechanism

GET/ENST Bretagne, 2 Rue de la Châtaigneraie, CS 17607, 35576 Cesson Sévigné Cedex, France; patrick.maille@enst-bretagne.fr

Received: 19 May 2005
Accepted: 7 May 2007

Abstract


The Progressive Second Price mechanism (PSP), recently introduced by Lazar and Semret to share an infinitely-divisible resource among users through pricing, has been shown to verify very interesting properties. Indeed, the incentive compatibility property of that scheme, and the convergence to an efficient resource allocation where established, using the framework of Game Theory. Therefore, that auction-based allocation and pricing scheme seems particularly well-suited to solve congestion problems in telecommunication networks, where the resource to share is the available bandwidth on a link. This paper aims at supplementing the existing results by highlighting some properties of the different equilibria that can be reached. We precisely characterize the possible outcomes of the PSP auction game in terms of players bid price: when the bid fee (cost of a bid update) tends to zero then the bid price of all users at equilibrium gets close to the so-called market clearing price of the resource. Therefore, observing an equilibrium of the PSP auction game gives some accurate information about the market clearing price of the resource.