TY - GEN A1 - Borndörfer, Ralf A1 - Mura, Annette A1 - Schlechte, Thomas T1 - Vickrey Auctions for Railway Tracks N2 - We consider an auction of slots to run trains through a railway network. In contrast to the classical setting for combinatorial auctions, there is not only competition for slots, but slots can mutually exclude each other, such that general conflict constraints on bids arise. This turns the winner determination problem associated with such an auction into a complex combinatorial optimization problem. It also raises a number of auction design questions, in particular, on incentive compatibilty. We propose a single-shot second price auction for railway slots, the Vickrey Track Auction (VTA). We show that this auction is incentive compatible, i.e., rational bidders are always motivated to bid their true valuation, and that it produces efficient allocations, even in the presence of constraints on allocations. These properties are, however, lost when rules on the submission of bids such as, e.g., lowest bids, are imposed. Our results carry over to generalized" Vickrey auctions with combinatorial constraints. T3 - ZIB-Report - 08-34 KW - Vickrey Auktion KW - Fahrplanung KW - Vickrey Auction KW - Track Allocation Problem Y1 - 2008 UR - https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-zib/frontdoor/index/index/docId/1085 UR - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-10855 SN - 1438-0064 ER -