On the competitive ratio of the random sampling auction

Abstract

We give a. simple analysis of the competitive ratio of the random sampling auction from [10]. The random sampling auction was first shown to be worst-case competitive in [9] (with a bound of 7600 on its competitive ratio); our analysis improves the bound to, 15. In support of the conjecture that random sampling auction is in fact 4-competitive, we show that on the equal revenue input, where any sale price gives the same revenue, random sampling is exactly a factor of four from optimal. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.