Caminati, Marco B. and Kerber, Manfred and Lange, Christoph and Rowat, Colin (2015) Sound auction specification and implementation. In: Proceedings of the Sixteenth ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC '15) :. ACM, pp. 547-564. ISBN 9781450334105
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
We introduce `formal methods' of mechanized reasoning from computer science to address two problems in auction design and practice: is a given auction design soundly specified, possessing its intended properties; and, is the design faithfully implemented when actually run? Failure on either front can be hugely costly in large auctions. In the familiar setting of the combinatorial Vickrey auction, we use a mechanized reasoner, Isabelle, to first ensure that the auction has a set of desired properties (e.g. allocating all items at non-negative prices), and to then generate verified executable code directly from the specified design. Having established the expected results in a known context, we intend next to use formal methods to verify new auction designs.