The exposure problem appears whenever an agent with complementary valuations bids to acquire a bundle of items sold sequentially, in independent auctions. In this letter, we review a possible solution that can help solve this problem, which involves selling options for the items, instead of the items themselves. We provide a brief overview of the state of the art in this field and discuss, based on recent results presented in [Mous et. al. 2008], under which conditions using option mechanisms would be desirable for both buyers and sellers, by comparison to direct auctioning of the items. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of further research directions in this field.
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Association for Computing Machinery, ACM
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Distributed Implementations of Adaptive Collective Decision Making
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Mous, L., Robu, V., & La Poutré, H. (2008). Can priced options solve the exposure problem in sequential auctions?. ACM SIGecom Exchanges, 7(2).