A General Framework for the Logical Representation of Combinatorial Exchange Protocols

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to propose a framework for representing and reasoning about the rules governing a combinatorial exchange. Such a framework is at first interest as long as we want to build up digital marketplaces based on auction, a widely used mechanism for automated transactions. Combinatorial exchange is the most general case of auctions, mixing the double and combinatorial variants: agents bid to trade bundles of goods. Hence the framework should fulfill two requirements: (i) it should enable bidders to express their bids on combinations of goods and (ii) it should allow describing the rules governing some market, namely the legal bids, the allocation and payment rules. To do so, we define a logical language in the spirit of the Game Description Language: the Combinatorial Exchange Description Language is the first language for describing combinatorial exchange in a logical framework. The contribution is two-fold: first, we illustrate the general dimension by representing different kinds of protocols, and second, we show how to reason about auction properties in this machine-processable language.