Bayesian and Randomized Clock Auctions

The recently introduced and highly practical class of deferred acceptance clock auctions offers a unique combination of desirable properties, including obvious strategy-proofness, unconditional winner privacy, and transparency. Early excitement around these auctions was dampened due to a result demonstrating that no deterministic and prior-free clock auction can guarantee better than a logarithmic approximation of the optimal social welfare, even in simple settings. In “Bayesian and Randomized Clock Auctions,” Feldman, Gkatzelis, Gravin, and Schoepflin reignite this excitement by demonstrating that one can achieve improved results for a wide class of instances if a clock auction can either use randomization or has access to prior information. The authors provide three different clock auctions that achieve these improved guarantees given access to different amounts of prior information, exhibiting how additional information can further simplify the auction design.