An Efficient Multi-Item Dynamic Auction with Budget Constrained Bidders

An auctioneer wishes to sell several heterogeneous indivisible items to a group of potential bidders. Each bidder has valuations over the items but faces a budget constraint and may therefore not be able to pay up to his valuations. In such markets, a competitive equilibrium typically fails to exist. We develop a dynamic auction and prove that the auction always finds a core allocation in finitely many rounds. The core allocation consists of an assignment of the items and its associated supporting price vector.