Keelvar CEO to present to Harvard EconCS Group

Keelvar CEO, Dr Alan Holland, had the honour of being invited to the EconCS group in Harvard University. So following the Meet Keelvar breakfast seminar in Boston on Oct 13th he will speak to researchers on the topic of "Risk Management for Combinatorial Auctions: Theory & Practice". This will be an invitation only event addressed to a research audience.

‍Risk Management for Combinatorial Auctions: Theory & Practice.

Part 1: Theory.

‍Auction theory has traditionally regarded bids in auctions as enforceable commitments. We relax this assumption and address the possibility of winning bids being withdrawn. In particular, we examine the significance of winning-bid withdrawal in a combinatorial auction setting. We present a computational framework for preemptively choosing allocations that are more robust to failure. We also consider truthful mechanism design in the context of risk management and present impossibility results in the general case and a truthful approximation scheme in a restricted case.

‍Part 2: Practice.

‍Keelvar provides a combinatorial auction SaaS solution to procurement and supply chain management teams. Keelvar's customers execute sourcing events with an aggregate spend exceeding $18bn annually. We summarize the primary research contributions in AI/EconCS literature that offered most impact for commercial users in the supply chain and procurement community. We argue that automation is set to be the next important wave of transformation in this sector and motivate some relevant research challenges.