Simultaneous Pooled Auctions with Multiple Bids and Preference Lists

This discussion paper led to a publication in the <I>Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics</I> (2010). Vol. 166, issue 2, pages 286-298. <P> A simultaneous pooled auction with multiple bids and preference lists is a way to auction multiple objects, in which bidders simultaneously express a bid for each object and a preference ordering over which object they would like to get in case they have the highest bid on more than one object. This type of auction has been used in the Netherlands and in Ireland to auction available spectrum. We show that this type of auction does not satisfy elementary desirable properties such as the existence of an efficient equilibrium.