@InProceedings{conen01b,
  author =	 {Wolfram Conen and Tuomas Sandholm},
  title =	 {Minimal preference elicitation in combinatorial
                  auctions},
  booktitle =	 {Proceedings of the International Joint Conference of
                  Artificial Intelligence Workshop on Economic Agents,
                  Models, and Mechanisms},
  year =	 2001,
  abstract =	 {Combinatorial auctions (CAs) where bidders can bid
                  on bundles of items can be very desirable market
                  mechanisms when the items sold exhibit
                  complementarity and/or substitutability, so the
                  bidder’s valuations for bundles are not
                  additive. However, in a basic CA, the bidders may
                  need to bid on exponentially many bundles, leading
                  to difficulties in determining those valuations,
                  undesirable information revelation, and unnecessary
                  communication. In this paper we present a design of
                  an auctioneer agent that uses topological structure
                  inherent in the problem to reduce the amount of
                  information that it needs from the bidders. An
                  analysis tool is presented as well as data
                  structures for storing and optimally assimilating
                  the information received from the bidders. Using
                  this information, the agent then narrows down the
                  set of desirable (welfare maximizing or Pareto
                  efficient) allocations, and decides which questions
                  to ask next. Several algorithms are presented that
                  ask the bidders for value, order, and rank
                  information.},
  keywords = 	 {auctions},
  url = 	 {http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/library/conen01b.pdf}
}