>Furthermore, bidding in combinatorial auctions can be challenging in both a computational and UX sense.
Can you elaborate on how it's challenging in a UX sense? I'm curious to know what the challenges are.
Can you elaborate on how it's challenging in a UX sense? I'm curious to know what the challenges are.
Information theory tells us that no universal bidding language (there's a representation of any package of interest) is uniformly more compact than the power set representation. Nonetheless, a good bidding language makes "common" bids compact and easy to communicate. We thought about this problem deeply and realized that functionally pure computer programs mapping proposals (packages of goods) to valuations (how much the bidder will pay or would want to receive) are about as natural as it gets. There's a direct analog in asking a human or a pricing algo for a price in a bilateral trade setting. However, our optimizer doesn't know what to do with an arbitrary computer algorithm, and exhaustively querying one to get the power set of prices out is computationally infeasible. However, using formal methods, we can (in the right setting) convert a computer program into an equivalent representation in a logic fragment called mixed integer real arithmetic. And that (via SMT solving) is something that an optimizer can work with.
You can see what Proxy Bidders (the pure functions that create expressive bids) look like here [1].
[1]: https://www.onechronos.com/docs/expressive/bidding-guide/#in...