Winner Price Monotonicity for Approximated Combinatorial Auctions

Combinatorial auctions are suitable mechanisms for efficient allocation of set of items for self-interested attendees such as software agents. Since optimal winner determination problem of combinatorial auctions is NP-hard, much work focuses on tackling the computational costs for winner determination. Since it is an important issue to guarantee the quality of approximated results, we have proposed desirable properties for such approximation algorithms. In this paper, we analyze the advantages and side-effects of preserving winner price monotonicity, one of our proposed desirable properties for approximation algorithms of combinatorial auctions.