Accelerating Combinatorial Clock Auctions using Bid Ranges

Auctions are important tools for resource allocation and price negotiations, while combinatorial auctions are perceived to achieve higher efficiency when allocating multiple items. In the recent decade, many auction designs are proposed and proven to be efficient, incentive compatible, and tractable. However most of the results hinge on quasi-linear preference bidders with ultimate patience, which is not quite realistic. In reality human bidders cannot engage in hundreds of auction rounds evaluating thousands of package combinations simultaneously. They either withdraw early or bid only on a limited subset of valuable packages. In this paper, we introduce bid ranges, with an additional sealed-bid phase before a Combinatorial Clock auction for information elicitation. With range information, the auction can start at higher prices with fewer rounds, and bidders are informed with the most relevant packages. Our design reduces the complexity both for the bidders and auctioneer, and is verified with computational simulations.