Solids - A combinatorial auction for a housing corporation

Abstract

On May 7, 2011, over one hundred bidders took part in a combinatorial auction for housing space in a newly erected building in Amsterdam (the Netherlands). This paper describes the development of this auction. We sketch our collaboration with the housing corporation that resulted in design choices with respect to first/second price, feedback, number of rounds, and tractability of the combinatorial auction. Furthermore, the winner determination problem is complicated by various municipal and building regulations that the allocation needs to satisfy. We show how these regulations can be included in an integer program that is used to solve the winner determination problem. Finally, computational experiments illustrate the tractability of this model. © 2012 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.