Auction Mechanism Design

Vickrey Auction Variant for Task Pricing

PACT employs a variant of the second-price sealed auction (Vickrey Auction) for task pricing [5].

Mechanism Definition:

1. Agent submits task description and maximum bid b_agent

2. Workers submit minimum acceptance prices b_w₁ ≤ b_w₂ ≤ ... ≤ b_wₙ

3. If b_agent ≥ b_w₁, match succeeds, payment price p = b_w₂

Incentive Compatibility: According to Vickrey's theorem, truthful bidding is the dominant strategy [5].

Dynamic Pricing Algorithm

For urgent tasks, a reverse Dutch auction is employed:

def dynamic_pricing(base_price, urgency, time_remaining):
    """
    Dynamic pricing algorithm
    
    Parameters:
    - base_price: Base price
    - urgency: Urgency level ∈ [0, 1]
    - time_remaining: Remaining time (hours)
    
    Returns: Current price
    """
    surge_multiplier = 1 + urgency * (2.0 - time_remaining / deadline)
    return base_price * surge_multiplier

This algorithm guarantees:

• Higher prices when time is more pressing

• Urgent tasks attract more workers

• Market automatically reaches supply-demand balance