Abstract: We develop a framework for trading in compound securities: financial instruments that pay off contingent on the outcomes of arbitrary statements in propositional logic. Buying or selling securities -- which can be thought of as betting on or against a particular future outcome -- allows agents both to hedge risk and to profit (in expectation) on subjective predictions. A compound securities market allows agents to place bets on arbitrary boolean combinations of events, enabling them to more closely achieve their optimal risk exposure, and enabling the market as a whole to more closely achieve the social optimum. The tradeoff for allowing such expressivity is in the complexity of the agents' and auctioneer's optimization problems. We develop and motivate the concept of a compound securities market, presenting the framework through a series of formal definitions and examples. We then analyze in detail the auctioneer's matching problem. We show that, with n events, the matching problem is co-NP-complete in the divisible case and Σp 2-complete in the indivisible case. We show that the latter hardness result holds even under severe language restrictions on bids. With log n events, the problem is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case. We briefly discuss matching algorithms and tractable special cases.

Betting Boolean-Style: A Framework for Trading in Securities Based on Logical Formulas Lance Fortnow Joe Kilian NEC Laboratories America 4 Independence Way Princeton, NJ 08540 David M. Pennock ∗ Overture Services, Inc., 3rd floor 74 N. Pasadena Ave Pasadena, CA 91103 Michael P. Wellman University of Michigan AI Laboratory 1101 Beal Avenue Ann Arbor, MI 48109 ABSTRACT We develop a framework for trading in compound securities: financial instruments that pay off contingent on the outcomes of arbitrary statements in propositional logic.
Buying or selling securities-which can be thought of as betting on or against a particular future outcome-allows agents both to hedge risk and to profit (in expectation) on subjective predictions.
A compound securities market allows agents to place bets on arbitrary boolean combinations of events, enabling them to more closely achieve their optimal risk exposure, and enabling the market as a whole to more closely achieve the social optimum.
The tradeoff for allowing such expressivity is in the complexity of the agents'' and auctioneer``s optimization problems.
We develop and motivate the concept of a compound securities market, presenting the framework through a series of formal definitions and examples.
We then analyze in detail the auctioneer``s matching problem.
We show that, with n events, the matching problem is co-NP-complete in the divisible case and Σp 2-complete in the indivisible case.
We show that the latter hardness result holds even under severe language restrictions on bids.
With log n events, the problem is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case.
We briefly discuss matching algorithms and tractable special cases.
Categories and Subject Descriptors F.2.2 [Theory of Computation]: Analysis of Algorithms and Problem Complexity-Nonnumerical Algorithms and Problems; J.4 [Computer Applications]: Social and Behavioral Sciences-Economics General Terms Algorithms, Economics, Theory.
1.
INTRODUCTION Securities markets effectively allow traders to place bets on the outcomes of uncertain future propositions.
Examples include stock markets like NASDAQ, options markets like CBOE [17], futures markets like CME [30], other derivatives markets, insurance markets, political stock markets [11, 12], sports betting markets [7, 13, 32], horse racing markets [33], idea futures markets [16], decision markets [14] and even market games [4, 24, 25].
The economic value of securities markets is two-fold.
First, they allow traders to hedge risk, or to insure against undesirable outcomes.
For example, the owner of a stock might buy a put option (the right to sell the stock at a particular price) in order to insure against a stock downturn.
Or the owner of a house may purchase an insurance contract to hedge against unforeseen damage to the house.
Second, securities markets allow traders to speculate, or to obtain a subjective expected profit when market prices do not reflect their assessment of the likelihood of future outcomes.
For example, a trader might buy a call option if he believes that the likelihood is high that the price of the underlying stock will go up, regardless of risk exposure to changes in the stock price.
Because traders stand to earn a profit if they can make effective probability assessments, often prices in financial markets yield very accurate aggregate forecasts of future events [10, 29, 27, 28].
Real securities markets have complex payoff structures with various triggers.
However, these can all be modeled as collections of more basic or atomic Arrow-Debreu securities [1, 8, 20].
One unit of one Arrow-Debreu security pays off one dollar if and only if (iff) a corresponding binary event occurs; it pays nothing if the event does not occur.
So, for example, one unit of a security denoted Acme100 might pay $1 iff Acme``s stock is above $100 on January 4, 2004.
An Acme stock option as it would be defined on a finan144 cial exchange can be though of as a portfolio of such atomic securities.1 In this paper, we develop and analyze a framework for trading in compound securities markets with payoffs contingent on arbitrary logical combinations of events, including conditionals.
For example, given binary events A, B, and C, one trader might bid to buy three units of a security denoted A ∧ ¯B ∨ C that pays off $1 iff the compound event A ∧ ¯B ∨ C occurs for thirty cents each.
Another trader may bid to sell six units of a security A|C that pays off $1 iff A occurs for fifty-five cents each, conditional on event C occurring, meaning that the transaction is revoked if C does not occur (i.e., no payoff is given and the price of the security is refunded) [5].
Bids may also be divisible, meaning that bidders are willing to accept less than the requested quantity, or indivisible, meaning that bids must be fulfilled either completely or not at all.
Given a set of such bids, the auctioneer faces a complex matching problem to decide which bids are accepted for how many units at what price.
Typically, the auctioneer seeks to take on no risk of its own, only matching up agreeable trades among the bidders, but we also consider alternative formulations where the auctioneer acts as a market maker willing to accept some risk.
We examine the computational complexity of the auctioneer``s matching problem.
Let the length of the description of all the available securities be O(n).
With n events, the matching problem is co-NP-complete in the divisible case and Σp 2-complete in the indivisible case.
This Σp 2-complete hardness holds even when the bidding language is significantly restricted.
With log n events, the problem is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case.
Section 2 presents some necessary background information, motivation, and related work.
Section 3 formally describes our framework for compound securities, and defines the auctioneer``s matching problem.
Section 4 briefly discusses natural algorithms for solving the matching problem.
Section 5 proves our central computational complexity results.
Section 6 discusses the possibility of tractable special cases.
Section 7 concludes with a summary and some ideas of future directions.
2.
PRELIMINARIES 2.1 Background and notation Imagine a world where there are only two future uncertain events of any consequence: (1) the event that one``s house is struck by lightning by December 31, 2003, denoted struck, and (2) the event that Acme``s stock price goes above $100 by January 4, 2004, denoted acme100.
In this simple world there are four possible future states-all possible combinations of the binary events'' outcomes: struck ∧ acme100, struck ∧ acme100, struck ∧ acme100, struck ∧ acme100.
Hedging risk can be thought of as an action of moving money between various possible future states.
For example, insur1 Technically, an option is a portfolio of infinitely many atomic securities, though it can be approximately modeled with a finite number.
ing one``s house transfers money from future states where struck is not true to states where it is.
Selling a security denoted acme100 -that pays off $1 iff the event acme100 occurs-transfers money from future states where Acme``s price is above $100 on January 4 to states where it``s not.
Speculating is also an act of transferring money between future states, though usually associated with maximizing expected return rather than reducing risk.
For example, betting on a football team moves money from the team loses state to the team wins state.
In practice, agents engage in a mixture of hedging and speculating, and there is no clear dividing line between the two [18].
All possible future outcomes form a state space Ω, consisting of mutually exclusive and exhaustive states ω ∈ Ω.
Often a more natural way to think of possible future outcomes is as an event space A of linearly independent events A ∈ A that may overlap arbitrarily.
So in our toy example struck ∧ acme100 is one of the four disjoint states, while struck is one of the two events.
Note that a set of n linearly independent events defines a state space Ω of size 2n consisting of all possible combinations of event outcomes.
Conversely, any state space Ω can be factored into log |Ω| events.
Suppose that A exhaustively covers all meaningful future outcomes (i.e., covers all eventualities that agents may wish to hedge against and/or speculate upon).
Then the existence of 2n linearly independent securities-called a complete market-allows agents to distribute their wealth arbitrarily across future states.2 An agent may create any hedge or speculation it desires.
Under classical conditions, agents trading in a complete market form an equilibrium where risk is allocated Pareto optimally.
If the market is incomplete, meaning it consists of fewer than 2n linearly independent securities, then in general agents cannot construct arbitrary hedges and equilibrium allocations may be nonoptimal [1, 8, 19, 20].
In real-world settings, the number of meaningful events n is large and thus the number of securities required for completeness is intractable.
No truly complete market exists or will ever exist.
One motivation behind compound securities markets is to provide a mechanism that supports the most transfer of risk using the least number of transactions possible.
Compound securities allow a high degree of expressivity in constructing bids.
The tradeoff for increased expressivity is increased computational complexity, from both the bidder``s and auctioneer``s point of view.
2.2 Related work The quest to reduce the number of financial instruments required to support an optimal allocation of risk dates to Arrow``s original work [1].
The requirement stated above of only 2n linearly-independent securities is itself a reduction from the most straightforward formulation.
In an economy with k standard goods, the most straightforward complete market contains k·2n securities, each paying off in one good under one state realization.
Arrow [1] showed that a market where securities and goods are essentially separated, with 2n securities paying off in a single numeraire good plus k spot markets in the standard goods, is also complete.
For our purposes, we need consider only the securities market.
2 By linearly independent securities, we mean that the vectors of payoffs in all future states of these securities are linearly independent.
145 Varian [34] shows that a complete market can be constructed using fewer than 2n securities, replacing the missing securities with options.
Still, the number of linearly independent financial instruments-securities plus optionsmust be 2n to guarantee completeness.
Though the requirement of 2n financial instruments cannot be relaxed if one wants to guarantee completeness in all circumstances, Pennock and Wellman [26] explore conditions under which a smaller securities market may be operationally complete, meaning that its equilibrium is Pareto optimal with respect to the agents involved, even if the market contains less than 2n securities.
The authors show that in some cases the market can be structured and compacted in analogy to Bayesian network representations of joint probability distributions [23].
They show that, if all agents'' risk-neutral independencies agree with the independencies encoded in the market structure, then the market is operationally complete.
For collections of agents all with constant absolute risk aversion, agreement on Markov independencies is sufficient.
Bossaerts, Fine, and Ledyard [2] develop a mechanism they call combined-value trading (CVT) that allows traders to order an arbitrary portfolio of securities in one bid, rather than breaking up the order into a sequence of bids on individual securities.
If the portfolio order is accepted, all of the implied trades on individual securities are executed simultaneously, thus eliminating so-called execution risk that prices will change in the middle of a planned sequence of orders.
The authors conduct laboratory experiments showing that, even in thin markets where ordinary sequential trading breaks down, CVT supports efficient pricing and allocation.
Note that CVT differs significantly from compound securities trading.
CVT allows instantaneous trading of any linear combination of securities, while compound securities allow more expressive securities that can encode nonlinear boolean combinations of events.
For example, CVT may allow an agent to order securities A and B in a bundle that pays off as a linear combination of A and B,3 but CVT won``t allow the construction of a compound security A ∧ B that pays off $1 iff both A and B occur, or a compound security A|B .
Related to CVT are combinatorial auctions [6, 21] and exchanges [31], mechanisms that have recently received quite a bit of attention in the economics and computer science literatures.
Combinatorial auctions allow bidders to place distinct values on all possible bundles of goods rather than just on individual goods.
In this way bidders can express substitutability and complementarity relationships among goods that cannot be expressed in standard parallel or sequential auctions.
Compound securities differ from combinatorial auctions in concept and complexity.
Compound securities allow bidders to construct an arbitrary bet on any of the 22n possible compound events expressible as logical functions of the n base events, conditional on any other of the 22n compound events.
Agents optimize based on their own subjective probabilities and risk attitude (and in general, their beliefs about other agents'' beliefs and utilities, ad infinitum).
The central auctioneer problem is identifying arbitrage opportunities: that is, to match bets together without taking on any risk.
Combinatorial auctions, on the other hand, allow bids on any of the 2n bundles of n goods.
Typically, 3 Specifically, one unit of each pays off $2 iff both A and B occur, $1 iff A or B occurs (but not both), and $0 otherwise.
uncertainty-and thus risk-is not considered.
The central auctioneer problem is to maximize social welfare.
Also note that the problems lie in different complexity classes.
While clearing a combinatorial auction is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case, matching in a compound securities market is NP-complete in the divisible case and Σp 2-complete in the indivisible case.
In fact, even the problem of deciding whether two bids on compound securities match, even in the divisible case, is NP-complete (see Section 5.2).
There is a sense in which it is possible to translate our matching problem for compound securities into an analogous problem for clearing two-sided combinatorial exchanges [31] of exponential size.
Specifically, if we regard payoff in a particular state as a good, then compound securities can be viewed as bundles of (fractional quantities of) such goods.
The material balance constraint facing the combinatorial auctioneer corresponds to a restriction that the compoundsecurity auctioneer be disallowed from assuming any risk.
Note that this translation is not at all useful for addressing the compound-security matching problem, as the resulting combinatorial exchange has an exponential number of goods.
Hanson [15] develops a market mechanism called a market scoring rule that is especially well suited for allowing bets on a combinatorial number of outcomes.
The mechanism maintains a joint probability distribution over all 2n states, either explicitly or implicitly using a Bayesian network or other compact representation.
At any time any trader who believes the probabilities are wrong can change any part of the distribution by accepting a lottery ticket that pays off according to a scoring rule (e.g., the logarithmic scoring rule) [35], as long as that trader also agrees to pay off the most recent person to change the distribution.
In the limit of a single trader, the mechanism behaves like a scoring rule, suitable for polling a single agent for its probability distribution.
In the limit of many traders, it produces a combined estimate.
Since the market essentially always has a complete set of posted prices for all possible outcomes, the mechanism avoids the problem of thin markets, or illiquidity, that necessarily plagues any market containing an exponential number of alternative investments.
The mechanism requires a patron to pay off the final person to change the distribution, though the patron``s payment is bounded.
Though Hanson offers some initial suggestions, several open problems remain, including efficient methods for representing and updating the joint distribution and recording traders positions and portfolios, without resorting to exponential time and space algorithms.
Fagin, Halpern, and Megiddo [9] give a sound and complete axiomatization for deciding whether sets of probabilistic inequalities are consistent.
Bids for compound securities can be thought of as expressions of probabilistic inequalities: for example, a bid to buy A ∧ B at price 0.3 is a statement that the probability of A ∧ B is greater than 0.3.
If a set of single-unit bids correspond to a set of inconsistent probabilistic inequalities, then there is a match.
However, because they are interested in a much different framework, Fagin et al. do not consider several complicating factors specific to the securities market framework: namely, handling multi-unit or fractional bid quantities, identifying matches, choosing among multiple matches, and optimizing based on probabilities and risk attitudes.
We address these issues below.
146 3.
FRAMEWORK FOR TRADING IN COMPOUND SECURITIES 3.1 High-level description Common knowledge among agents is the set of events A.
There are no predefined securities.
Instead, agents offer to buy or sell securities of their own design that pay off contingent on logical combinations of events and event negations.
Combination operators may include conjunctions, disjunctions, and conditionals.
For all practical purposes, it is impossible for agents to trade in enough securities (2n ) to form a complete market, so agents must devise their best tradeoff between the number and complexity of their bids, and the extent to which their risks are hedged and desirable bets are placed.
In its most general form, the problem is game-theoretic in nature, since what an agent should offer depends on what it believes other agents will accept.
At the other end of the spectrum, a simplified version of the problem is to optimize bids only on currently available securities at current prices.
In between these two formulations are other possible interesting optimization problems.
Approximation algorithms might also be pursued.
The auctioneer faces a nontrivial problem of matching buy and sell orders to maximize surplus (the cash and securities left over after accepted bids are fulfilled).
For example, offers to sell A1A2 at $0.2 and A1 ¯A2 at $0.1 can match with an offer to buy A1 at $0.4, with surplus $0.1.
Or an offer to sell A1 at $0.3 can match with an offer to buy A1A2 at $0.4, with surplus $0.1 in cash and A1 ¯A2 in securities.
In general, a single security might qualify for multiple matches, but only one can be transacted.
So the auctioneer must find the optimal set of matches that maximizes surplus, which could be measured in a number of ways.
Again, approximation algorithms might be considered.
In another formulation, the auctioneer functions as a market maker willing to take on a certain amount of risk.
Informally, our motivation is to provide a mechanism that allows a very high degree of expressivity in placing hedges and bets, and is also capable of approximating the optimal (complete-market) allocation of risk, trading off the number and complexity of securities and transactions needed.
3.2 Formal description 3.2.1 Securities We use φ and ψ to denote arbitrary boolean formulas, or logical combinations of events in A.
We denote securities φ|ψ .
Securities pay off $1 if and only if (iff) φ and ψ are true, pay off $0 iff φ is false and ψ is true, and are canceled (i.e., any price paid is refunded) iff ψ is false.
We define T ≡ Ω to be the event true and F ≡ ∅ to be the event false.
We abbreviate φ|T as φ .
3.2.2 Orders Agents place orders, denoted o, of the form q units of φ|ψ at price p per unit, where q > 0 implies a buy order and q < 0 implies a sell order.
We assume agents submitting buy (sell) orders will accept any price p∗ ≤ p (p∗ ≥ p).
We distinguish between divisible and indivisible orders.
Agents submitting divisible orders will accept any quantity αq where 0 < α ≤ 1.
Agents submitting indivisible orders will accept only exactly q units, or none at all.
We believe that, given the nature of what is being traded (state-contingent dollars), most agents will be content to trade using divisible orders.
Every order o can be translated into a payoff vector Υ across all states ω ∈ Ω.
The payoff Υ ω in state ω is q · 1ω∈ψ(1ω∈φ − p), where 1ω∈E equals 1 iff ω ∈ E and zero otherwise.
Recall that the 2n states correspond to the 2n possible combinations of event outcomes.
We index multiple orders with subscripts (e.g., oi and Υi).
Let the set of all orders be O and the set of all corresponding payoff vectors be P. Example 1.
(Translating orders into payoff vectors) Suppose that |A| = 3.
Consider an order to buy two units of A2 ∨ A3|A1 at price $0.8.
The corresponding payoff vector is: Υ = Υ A1A2A3 , Υ A1A2 ¯A3 , Υ A1 ¯A2A3 , ... , Υ ¯A1 ¯A2 ¯A3 = 2 · 0.2, 0.2, 0.2, −0.8, 0, 0, 0, 0 2 3.2.3 The matching problem The auctioneer``s task, called the matching problem, is to determine which orders to accept among all orders o ∈ O. Let αi be the fraction of order oi accepted by the auctioneer (in the indivisible case, αi must be either 0 or 1; in the divisible case, αi can range from 0 to 1).
If αi = 0, then order oi is considered rejected and no transactions take place concerning this order.
For accepted orders (αi > 0), the auctioneer receives the money lost by bidders and pays out the money won by bidders, so the auctioneer``s payoff vector is: Υauc = X Υi∈P −αiΥi.
We also call the auctioneer``s payoff vector the surplus vector, since it is the (possibly state-contingent) money left over after all accepted orders are filled.
Assume that the auctioneer wants to choose a set of orders so that it is guaranteed not to lose any money in any future state, but that the auctioneer does not necessarily insist on obtaining a positive benefit from the transaction (i.e., the auctioneer is content to break even).
Definition 1.
(Matching problem, indivisible case) Given a set of orders O, does there exist αi ∈ {0, 1} with at least one αi = 1 such that ∀ω, Υ ω auc ≥ 0?
In other words, does there exist a nonempty subset of orders that the auctioneer can accept without risk?
2 If ∀ω, Υ ω auc = c where c is nonnegative, then the surplus leftover after processing this match is c dollars.
Let m = minω[Υ ω auc].
In general, processing a match leaves m dollars in cash and Υ ω auc − m in state-contingent dollars, which can then be translated into securities.
Example 2.
(Indivisible order matching) Suppose |A| = 2.
Consider an order to buy one unit of A1A2 at price 0.4 and an order to sell one unit of A1 at price 0.3.
The 147 corresponding payoff vectors are: Υ1 = Υ A1A2 1 ,Υ A1 ¯A2 1 ,Υ ¯A1A2 1 ,Υ ¯A1 ¯A2 1 = 0.6, −0.4, −0.4, −0.4 Υ2 = −0.7, −0.7, 0.3, 0.3 The auctioneer``s payoff vector (the negative of the componentwise sum of the above two vectors) is: Υauc = −Υ1 − Υ2 = 0.1, 1.1, 0.1, 0.1 .
Since all components are nonnegative, the two orders match.
The auctioneer can process both orders, leaving a surplus of $0.1 in cash and one unit of A1 ¯A2 in securities.
2 Now consider the divisible case, where order can be partially filled.
Definition 2.
(Matching problem, divisible case) Given a set of orders O, does there exist αi ∈ [0, 1] with at least one αi > 0 such that ∀ω, Υ ω auc ≥ 0, 2 Example 3.
(Divisible order matching) Suppose |A| = 2.
Consider an order to sell one unit of A1 at price $0.5, an order to buy one unit of A1A2|A1 ∨ A2 at price $0.5, and an order to buy one unit of A1| ¯A2 at price $0.4.
The corresponding payoff vectors are: Υ1 = Υ A1A2 1 ,Υ A1 ¯A2 1 ,Υ ¯A1A2 1 ,Υ ¯A1 ¯A2 1 = −0.5, −0.5, 0.5, 0.5 Υ2 = 0.5, −0.5, −0.5, 0 Υ3 = 0, 0.6, 0, −0.4 It is clear by inspection that no non-empty subset of whole orders constitutes a match: in all cases where αi ∈ {0, 1} (other than all αi = 0), at least one state sums to a positive amount (negative for the auctioneer).
However, if α1 = α2 = 3/5 and α3 = 1, then the auctioneer``s payoff vector is: Υauc = − 3 5 Υ1 − 3 5 Υ2 − Υ3 = 0, 0, 0, 0.1 , constituting a match.
The auctioneer can process 3/5 of the first and second orders, and all of the third order, leaving a surplus of 0.1 units of ¯A1 ¯A2 .
In this example, a divisible match exists even though an indivisible match is not possible; we examine the distinction in detail in Section 5, where we separate the two matching problems into distinct complexity classes.
2 The matching problems defined above are decision problems: the task is only to show the existence or nonexistence of a match.
However, there may be multiple matches from which the auctioneer can choose.
Sometimes the choices are equivalent from the auctioneer``s perspective; alternatively, an objective function can be used to find an optimal match according to that objective.
Example 4.
(Auctioneer alternatives I) Suppose |A| = 2.
Consider an order to sell one unit of A1 at price $0.7, an order to sell one unit of A2 at price $0.7, an order to buy one unit of A1A2 at price $0.4, an order to buy one unit of A1 ¯A2 at price $0.4, and an order to buy one unit of ¯A1A2 at price $0.4.
The corresponding payoff vectors are: Υ1 = −0.3,−0.3, 0.7, 0.7 Υ2 = −0.3, 0.7,−0.3, 0.7 Υ3 = 0.6,−0.4,−0.4,−0.4 Υ4 = −0.4, 0.6,−0.4,−0.4 Υ5 = −0.4,−0.4, 0.6,−0.4 Consider the indivisible case.
The auctioneer could choose to accept bids 1, 3, and 4 together, or the auctioneer could choose to accept bids 2, 3, and 5 together.
Both constitute matches, and in fact both yield identical payoffs (Υauc = 0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1 , or $0.1 in cash) for the auctioneer.
2 Example 5.
(Auctioneer alternatives II) Suppose |A| = 2.
Consider an order to sell two units of A1 at price $0.6, an order to buy one unit of A1A2 at price $0.3, and an order to buy one unit of A1 ¯A2 at price $0.5.
The corresponding payoff vectors are: Υ1 = −0.4,−0.4, 0.6, 0.6 Υ2 = 0.7,−0.3,−0.3,−0.3 Υ3 = −0.5, 0.5,−0.5,−0.5 Consider the divisible case.
The auctioneer could choose to accept one unit each of all three bids, yielding a payoff to the auctioneer of $0.2 in cash (Υauc = 0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.2 ).
Alternatively, the auctioneer could choose to accept 4/3 units of bid 1, and one unit each of bids 2 and 3, yielding a payoff to the auctioneer of 1/3 units of security A1 .
Both choices constitute matches (in fact, accepting any number of units of bid 1 between 1 and 4/3 can be part of a match), though depending on the auctioneer``s objective, one choice might be preferred over another.
For example, if the auctioneer believes that A1 is very likely to occur, it may prefer to accept 4/3 units of bid 1.
2 There are many possible criteria for the auctioneer to decide among matches, all of which seem reasonable in some circumstances.
One natural quantity to maximize is the volume of trade among bidders; another is the auctioneer``s utility, either with or without the arbitrage constraint.
Definition 3.
(Trade maximization problem) Given a set of indivisible (divisible) orders O, choose αi ∈ {0, 1} (αi ∈ [0, 1]) to maximize X i αiqi, under the constraint that ∀ω, Υ ω auc ≥ 0.
2 Another reasonable variation is to maximize the total percent of orders filled, or P i αi, under the same (risk-free) constraint that ∀ω, Υ ω auc ≥ 0.
Definition 4.
(Auctioneer risk-free utility-maximization problem) Let the auctioneer``s subjective probability for each state ω be Pr(ω), and let the auctioneer``s utility for y dollars be u(y).
Given a set of indivisible (divisible) orders O, choose αi ∈ {0, 1} (αi ∈ [0, 1]) to maximize X ω∈Ω Pr(ω)u(Υ ω auc), 148 under the constraint that ∀ω, Υ ω auc ≥ 0.
2 Definition 5.
(Auctioneer standard utility-maximization problem) Let the auctioneer``s subjective probability for each state ω be Pr(ω), and let the auctioneer``s utility for y dollars be u(y).
Given a set of indivisible (divisible) orders O, choose αi ∈ {0, 1} (αi ∈ [0, 1]) to maximize X ω∈Ω Pr(ω)u Υ ω auc .
2 This last objective function drops the risk-free (arbitrage) constraint.
In this case, the auctioneer is a market maker with beliefs about the likelihood of outcomes, and the auctioneer may actually lose money is some outcomes.
Still other variations and other optimization criteria seem reasonable, including social welfare, etc..
It also seems reasonable to suppose that the surplus be shared among bidders and the auctioneer, rather than retained solely by the auctioneer.
This is analogous to choosing a common transaction price in a double auction (e.g., the midpoint between the bid and ask prices), rather than the buyer paying the bid price and the seller receiving the ask price, with the difference going to the auctioneer.
The problem becomes more complicated when dividing surplus securities, in part because they are valued differently by different agents.
Formulating reasonable sharing rules and examining the resulting incentive properties seems a rich and promising avenue for further investigation.
4.
MATCHING ALGORITHMS The straightforward algorithm for solving the divisible matching problem is linear programming; we set up an appropriate linear program in Section 5.1.
The straightforward algorithm for solving the indivisible matching problem is integer programming.
With n events, to set up the appropriate linear or integer programs, simply writing out the payoff vectors in the straightforward way requires O(2n ) space.
There is some hope that specialized algorithms that exploit structure among bids can perform better in terms of average-case time and space complexity.
For example, in some cases matches can be identified using logical reduction techniques, without writing down the full payoff vectors.
So a match between the following bids: • sell 1 of A1A2 at $0.2 • sell 1 of A1 ¯A2 at $0.1 • buy 1 of A1 at $0.4 can be identified by reducing the first two bids to an equivalent offer to sell A1 at $0.3 that clearly matches with the third bid.
Formalizing a logical-reduction algorithm for matching, or other algorithms that can exploit special structure among the bids, is a promising avenue for future work.
5.
THE COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY OF MATCHING In this section we examine the computational complexity of the auctioneer``s matching problem.
Here n refers to the problem``s input size that includes descriptions of all of the buy and sell orders.
We also assume that n bounds the number of base securities.
We consider four cases based on two parameters: 1.
Whether to allow divisible or indivisible orders.
2.
The number of securities.
We consider two possibilities: (a) O(log n) base securities yielding a polynomial number of states.
(b) An unlimited number of base securities yielding an exponential number of states.
We show the following results.
Theorem 1.
The matching problem is 1.
computable in polynomial-time for O(log n) base securities with divisible orders.
2.
co-NP-complete for unlimited securities with divisible orders.
3.
NP-complete for O(log n) base securities with indivisible orders.
4.
Σp 2-complete for unlimited securities with indivisible orders.
5.1 Small number of securities with divisible orders We can build a linear program based on Definition 2.
We have variables αi.
For each i, we have 0 ≤ αi ≤ 1 and for each state ω in Ω we have the constraint Υ ω auc = X i −αiΥ ω i ≥ 0.
Given these constraints we maximize X i αi.
A set of orders has a matching exactly when P i αi > 0.
With O(log n) base securities, we have |Ω| bounded by a polynomial so we can solve this linear program in polynomial time.
Note that one might argue that one should maximize some linear combination of the −Υ ω i s to maximize the surplus.
However this approach will not find matchings that have zero surplus.
5.2 Large number of securities with divisible orders With unlimited base securities, the linear program given in Section 5.1 has an exponential number of constraint equations.
Each constraint is short to describe and easily computable given ω.
149 Let m ≤ n be the total number of buy and sell orders.
By the theory of linear programming, an upper bound on the objective function can be forced by a collection of m + 1 constraints.
So if no matching exists there must exist m + 1 constraints that force all the αi to zero.
In nondeterministic polynomial-time we can guess these constraints and solve the reduced linear program.
This shows that matching is in co-NP.
To show co-NP-completeness we reduce the NP-complete problem of Boolean formula satisfiability to the nonexistence of a matching.
Fix a formula φ.
Let the base securities be the variables of φ and consider the single security φ with a buy order of 0.5.
If the formula φ is satisfiable then there is some state with payoff 0.5 and no fractional unit of the security φ is a matching.
If the formula φ is not satisfiable then every state has an auctioneer``s payoff of 0.5 and a single unit of the security φ is a matching.
One could argue that if the formula φ is not satisfiable then no fully rational buyer would want to buy φ for a cost of 0.5.
We can get around this problem by adding auxiliary base securities, A and B, and defining two securities τ = (φ ∧ A) ∨ (A ∧ B) τ = (φ ∧ A) ∨ (A ∧ B) with separate buy orders of 0.5 on each.
If φ were satisfiable then in the state corresponding to the satisfying assignment and both A and B to be true, τ and τ both have an auctioneer``s payoff of −0.5 so even no divisible matching can exist.
If φ were not satisfiable then one unit of each would be a matching since in every state at least one of τ or τ are false.
5.3 Small number of securities with indivisible orders This case is easily seen to be in NP: Just nondeterministically guess a nonempty subset S of orders and check for each state ω in Ω that Υ ω auc = X i∈S −Υ ω i ≥ 0.
Since |Ω| and |S| are bounded by a polynomial in n, the verification can be done in polynomial time.
To show that matching is NP-complete we reduce the NPcomplete problem EXACT COVER BY 3-SETS (X3C) to a matching of securities.
The input to X3C consists of a set X and a collection C of 3-element subsets of X.
The input (X, C) is in X3C if C contains an exact cover of X, i.e., there is a subcollection C of C such that every element of X occurs in exactly one member of C .
Karp showed that X3C is NP-complete.
Suppose we have an instance (X, C) with the vector X = {x1, ... , x3q} and C = {c1, ... , cm}.
We set Ω = {e1, ... , e3q, r, s} and define securities labelled φ1 , ... , φm , ψ1 , ... , ψq and τ , as follows: • Security φi is true in state r, and is true in state ek if k is not in ci.
• Security ψj is true only in state s. • Security τ is true in each state ek but not r or s.
We have buy orders on each φi and ψj security for 0.5 − 1 8q and a buy order on τ for 0.5.
We claim that a matching exists if and only if (X, C) is in X3C.
If (X, C) is in X3C, let C be the subcollection that covers each element of X exactly once.
Note that |C | = q.
We claim the collection consisting of φi for each ci in C , every ψj and τ has a matching.
In each state ek we have an auctioneer``s payoff of (.5 − 1 8q ) + (q − 1)(−.5 − 1 8q ) + q(.5 − 1 8q ) − .5 = .5 − 2q 1 8q = .25 ≥ 0.
In states r and s the auctioneer``s payoffs are −q(.5 + 1 8q ) + −q(−.5 + 1 8q ) + .5 = −5 − 2q 1 8q = .25 ≥ 0.
Suppose now that (X, C) is not in X3C but there is a matching.
Consider the number q of the φi in that matching and q the number of ψj in the matching.
Since a matching requires a nonempty subset of the orders and τ by itself is not a matching we have q + q > 0.
We have three cases.
q > q: In state r, the auctioneer``s payoff is −q (.5 + 1 8q ) − q(−.5 + 1 8q ) + .5 ≤ −(q + q) 1 8q < 0.
q > q : In state s, the auctioneer``s payoff is −q (.5 + 1 8q ) − q (−.5 + 1 8q ) + .5 ≤ −(q + q ) 1 8q < 0.
q ≤ q ≤ q: Consider the set C consisting of the ci where φi is in the matching.
There must be some state ek not in any of the ci or C would be an exact cover.
The auctioneer``s payoff in ek is at most −q (.5 + 1 8q ) − q (−.5 + 1 8q ) ≤ −(q + q ) 1 8q < 0.
5.4 Large Number of Securities with Indivisible Orders The class Σp 2 is the second level of the polynomial-time hierarchy.
A language L is in Σp 2 if there exists a polynomial p and a set A in P such that x is in L if and only if there is a y with |y| = p(|x|) such that for all z, with |z| = p(|x|), (x, y, z) is in A.
The class Σp 2 contains both NP and coNP.
Unless the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses (which is considered unlikely), a problem that is complete for Σp 2 is not contained in NP or co-NP.
We will show that computing a matching is Σp 2-complete, and remains so even for quite restricted types of securities, and hence is (likely) neither in NP or co-NP.
While it may seem that being NP-complete or co-NP-complete is hard enough, there are further practical consequences of being outside of NP and co-NP.
If the matching problem were in NP, one could use heuristics to search for and verify a match if it exists; even if such heuristics fail in the worst case, they may succeed for most examples in practice.
Similarly, if the matching problem were in co-NP, one might hope to at least heuristically rule out the possibility of matching.
But for problems outside of NP or co-NP, there is no framework for verifying that a heuristically derived answer is correct.
Less formally, for NP (or co-NP)-complete problems, you have to be lucky; for Σp 2-complete problems, you can``t even tell if you``ve been lucky.
150 We note that the existence of a matching is in Σp 2: We use y to choose a subset of the orders and z to represent a state ω with (x, y, z) in A if the set of orders has a total nonpositive auctioneer``s payoff in state ω.
We prove a stronger theorem which implies that matching is in Σp 2.
Let S1, ... , Sn be a set of securities, where each security Si has cost ci and pays off pi whenever formula Ci is satisfied.
The 0 − 1-matching problem asks whether one can, by accepting either 0 or 1 of each security, guarantee a worst-case payoff strictly larger than the total cost.
Theorem 2.
The 0−1-matching problem is Σp 2-complete.
Furthermore, the problem remains Σp 2-complete under the following two special cases: 1.
For all i, Ci is a conjunction of 3 base events (or their negations), pi = 1, and ci = cj for all i and j. 2.
For all i, Ci is a conjunction of at most 2 base securities (or their negations).
These hardness results hold even if there is a promise that no subset of the securities guarantees a worst-case payoff identical to their cost.
To prove Theorem 2, we reduce from the standard Σp 2 problem that we call T∃∀BF.
Given a boolean formula φ with variables x1, ... , xn and y1, ... , yn is the following fullyquantified formula true ∃x1 ... ∃xn∀y1 ... ∀yn φ(x1, ... , xn, y1, ... , yn)?
The problem remains Σp 2-complete when φ(x1, ... , xn, y1, ... , yn) is restricted to being a disjunction of conjunctions of at most 3 variables (or their negations), e.g., φ(x1, ... , xn, y1, ... , yn) = (x1 ∧ ¯x3 ∧ y2) ∨ (x2 ∧ y3 ∧ y7) ∨ · · · .
This form, without the bound on the conjunction size, is known as disjunctive normal form (DNF); the restriction to conjunctions of 3 variables is 3-DNF.
We reduce T∃∀BF to finding a matching.
For the simplest reduction, we consider the matching problem where one has a set of Arrow-Debreu securities whose payoff events are conjunctions of the base securities, or their negations.
The auctioneer has the option of accepting either 0 or 1 of each of the given securities.
We first reduce to the case where the payoff events are conjunctions of arbitrarily many base events (or their negations).
By a standard trick we can reduce the number of base events in each conjunction to 3, and with a slight twist we can even ensure that all securities have the same price as well as the same payoff.
Finally, we show that the problem remains hard even if only conjunctions of 2 variables are allowed, though with securities that deviate slightly from Arrow-Debreu securities in that they may have varying, non unit payoffs.
5.4.1 The basic reduction Before describing the securities, we give some intuition.
The T∃∀BFproblem may be viewed as a game between a selector and an adversary.
The selector sets the xi variables, and then the adversary sets the yi variables so as to falsify the formula φ.
We can view the 0 − 1-matching problem as one in which the auctioneer is a buyer who buys securities corresponding to disjunctions of the base events, and then the adversary sets the values of the base events to minimize the payoff from the securities.
We construct our securities so that the optimal buying strategy is to buy n expensive securities along with a set of cheap securities, of negligible cost (for some cases we can modify the construction so that all securities have the same cost).
The total cost of the securities will be just under 1, and each security pays off 1, so the adversary must ensure that none of the securities pays off.
Each expensive security forces the adversary to set some variable, xi to a particular value to prevent the security from paying off; this corresponds to setting the xi variables in the original game.
The cheap securities are such that preventing every one of of these securities from paying off is equivalent to falsifying φ in the original game.
Among the technical difficulties we face is how to prevent the buyer from buying conflicting securities, e.g., one that forces xi = 0 and the other that forces xi = 1, allowing for a trivial arbitrage.
Secondly, for our analysis we need to ensure that a trader cannot spend more to get more, say by spending 1.5 for a set of securities with the property that at least 2 securities pay off under all possible events.
For each of the variables {xi}, {yi} in φ, we add a corresponding base security (with the same labels).
For each existential variable xi we add additional base securities, ni and zi.
We also include a base security Q.
In our basic construction, each expensive security costs C and each cheap security costs ; all securities pay off 1.
We require that Cn+ (|cheap securities|) < 1 and C(n+1) > 1.
That is, one can buy n expensive securities and all of the cheap securities for less than 1, but one cannot buy n + 1 expensive securities for less than 1.
We at times refer to a security by its payoff clause.
Remark: We may loosely think of as 0.
However, this would allow one to buy a security for nothing that pays (in the worst case) nothing.
By making > 0 , we can show it hard to distinguish portfolios that guarantee a positive profit from those that risk a positive loss.
Setting > 0 will also allow us to show hardness results for the case where all securities have the same cost.
For 1 ≤ i ≤ n, we have two expensive securities with payoff clauses (¯xi ∧Q) and (¯ni ∧Q) and two cheap securities with payoff clauses (xi ∧ ¯zi) and (ni ∧ ¯zi).
For each clause C ∈ φ, we convert every negated variable ¯xi into ni and add the conjunction z1 ∧ · · · ∧ zn.
Thus, for a clause C = (x2 ∧ ¯x7 ∧ ¯y5) we construct a cheap security SC, with payoff clause (z1 ∧ · · · ∧ zn ∧ x2 ∧ n7 ∧ ¯y5).
Finally, we have a cheap security with payoff clause ( ¯Q).
We now argue that a matching exists iff ∃x1 ... ∃xn∀y1 ... ∀yn φ(x1, ... , xn, y1, ... , yn).
We do this by successively constraining the buyer and the adversary, eliminating behaviors that would cause the other player to win.
The resulting reasonable strategies correspond exactly to the game version of T∃∀BF.
First, observe that if the adversary sets all of the base securities to false (0), then only the ( ¯Q) security will pay off.
151 Thus, no buyer can buy more than n expensive securities and guarantee a profit.
The problem is thus whether one can buy n expensive securities and all the cheap securities, so that at for any setting of the base events at least one security will pay off.
Clearly, the adversary must make Q hold, or the ( ¯Q) security will pay off.
Next, we claim that for each i, 1 ≤ i ≤ i, the auctioneer must buy at least one of the (¯xi ∧ Q) and (¯ni ∧ Q) securities.
This follow from the fact that if the adversary sets xi, ni and zi to be false, and every other base event to be true, then only the (¯xi ∧ Q) and (¯ni ∧ Q) securities will pay off.
As no auctioneer can buy more than n expensive securities, it must therefore buy exactly one of (¯xi ∧ Q) or (¯ni ∧ Q), for each i, 1 ≤ i ≤ n. For the rest of the analysis, we assume that the auctioneer follows this constraint.
Suppose that the buyer buys (¯xi ∧Q).
Then the adversary must set xi to be true (since it must set Q to be true), or the security will pay off.
It must then set zi to be true or (xi∧¯zi) will pay off.
Since the buyer doesn``t buy (¯ni ∧ Q) (by the above constraint), and all the other securities pay the same or less when ni is made false, we can assume without loss of generality that the adversary sets ni to be false.
Similarly, if the buyer buys (¯ni ∧ Q), then the adversary must set ni and zi to be true, and we can assume without loss of generality that the adversary sets xi to be false.
Note that the adversary must in all cases set each zi event to be true.
Summarizing the preceding argument, there is an exact correspondence between the rational strategies of the buyer and settings for the xi variables forced on the adversary.
Furthermore, the adversary is also constrained to set the variables Q, z1, ... , zn to be true, and without loss of generality may be assumed to set ni = ¯xi.
Under these constraints, those securities not corresponding to clauses in φ are guaranteed to not pay off.
The adversary also decides the value of the y1, ... , ym base events.
Recall that for each clause C ∈ φ there is a corresponding security SC.
Given that zi is true and ni = ¯xi (without loss of generality), it follows from the construction of SC that the setting of the yis causes SC to pay off iff it satisfies C.
This establishes the reduction from T∃∀BF to the matching problem, when the securities are constrained to be a conjunction of polynomially many base events or their negations.
5.4.2 Reducing to 3-variable conjunctions There are standard methods for reducing DNF formulae to 3-DNF formulae, which are trivially modifiable to our securities framework; we include the reduction for completeness.
Given a security S whose payoff clause is C = (v1 ∧ v2 ∧ · · · ∧ vk) (variable negations are irrelevant to this discussion), cost c and payoff p, introduce a new auxiliary variable, w, and replace the security with two securities, S1 and S2, with payoff clauses, C1 = (v1 ∧ v2 ∧ w) and C2 = ( ¯w ∧ v3 ∧ · · · ∧ vk).
The securities both have payoff p, and their costs can be any positive values that sum to c. Note that at most one of the securities can pay off at a time.
If only one security is bought, then the adversary can always set w so that it won``t pay off; hence the auctioneer will buy either both or neither, for a total cost of c (here we use the fact that one is only allowed to buy either 0 or 1 shares of each security).
Then, it may be verified that, given the ability to set w arbitrarily, the adversary can cause C to be unsatisfied iff it can cause both C1 and C2 to be unsatisfied.
Hence, owning one share each of S1 and S2 is equivalent to owning one share of S. Note that C1 has three variables and C2 has k−1 variables.
By applying the transformation successively, one obtains an equivalent set of securities, of polynomial size, whose payoff clauses have at most 3 variables.
We note that in the basic construction, all of the clauses with more than 3 variables are associated with cheap securities (cost ).
Instead of subdividing costs, we can simply make all of the resulting securities have cost ; the constraints on C and must reflect the new, larger number of cheap securities.
One can ensure that all of the payoff clauses have exactly 3 variables, with a similar construction.
A security S with cost c, payoff p and defining clause (x ∧ y) can be replaced by securities S1 and S2 with cost c/2, payoff p and defining clauses (x∧y∧w) and (x∧y∧ ¯w), where w is a new auxiliary variable.
Essentially the same analysis as given above applies to this case.
The case of single-variable payoff clauses is handled by two applications of this technique.
5.4.3 Reducing to equi-cost securities By setting C and appropriately, one can ensure that in the basic reduction every security costs a polynomially bounded integer multiple of ; call this ratio r.
We now show how to reduce this case to the case where every security costs .
Recall that the expensive securities have payoff clauses (¯xi ∧ Q) or (¯ni ∧ Q).
Assume that security S has payoff clause (¯xi ∧ Q) (the other case is handled identically).
Replace S with security S , with payoff clause (¯xi ∧ Q ∧ w1) (w1, ... , wr−1 are auxiliary variables; fresh variables are chosen for each clause), and also S1, ... , Sr−1, with payoff clauses ( ¯w1 ∧ w2), ( ¯w2 ∧ w3), ... , ( ¯wr−2 ∧ wr−1), and( ¯wr−1 ∧ ¯w1).
Clearly, buying none of the new securities is equivalent to not buying the original security.
We show that buying all of the new securities is equivalent to buying the original security, and that buying a proper, nonempty subset of the securities is irrational.
We first note that if the buyer buys securities S1, ... , Sr−1, then the adversary must set w1 to be true, or one of the securities will pay off.
To see this, note that if wi is set to false, then ( ¯wi ∧wi+1) will be true unless wi+1 is set to false; thus, setting w1 to false forces the adversary to set wr−1 to false, causing the final clause to be true.
Having set w1 true, the adversary can set w2, ... , wr−1 to false, ensuring that none of the securities S1, ... , Sr−1 pays out.
If wi is true, then (¯xi ∧ Q ∧ w1) is equivalent to (¯xi ∧ Q).
So buying all of the replacement securities for each is equivalent to buying the original security for r.
It remains to show that buying a proper, nonempty subset of the securities is irrational.
If one doesn``t buy S , then the adversary can set the w variables so that none of S1, ... , Sr−1 will pay off; any money spent on these securities is wasted.
If one doesn``t buy Sr−1, the adversary can set all w to false, in which case none of the new clauses will pay off, regardless of the value of xi and Q. Similarly, if one 152 doesn``t buy Si, for 1 ≤ i ≤ r −2, the adversary can set wi+1 to be true, all the other w variables to be false, and again there is no payoff, regardless of the value of xi and Q. Thus, buying a proper subset of these securities will not increase ones payoff.
We note that this reduction can be combined trivially with the reduction that ensures that all of the defining clauses have 3 or fewer variables.
With a slightly messier argument, all of the defining clauses can be set up to have exactly 3 variables.
5.4.4 Reducing to clauses of at most 2 variables If we allow securities to have variable payoffs and prices, we can reduce to the case where each security``s payoff clause is a conjunction of at most 2 variables or their negations.
Given a security s with payoff clause (X ∧ Y ∧ Z), cost c and payoff 1, we introduce fresh auxiliary variables, w1, w2 and w3 (new variables are used for each clause) and replace S with the following securities: • Securities S1, S2 and S3, each with cost c/3 and payoff 1, with respective payoff clauses (X ∧ w1), (Y ∧ w2) and (Z ∧ w3).
• Securities S1, ... , S6, each with cost 4 and payoff 24 − 2, with payoff clauses, (w1 ∧ w2) (w1 ∧ w3) (w2 ∧ w3) ( ¯w1 ∧ ¯w2) ( ¯w1 ∧ ¯w3) ( ¯w2 ∧ ¯w3) Here, 2 is a tiny positive quantity, described later.
By a simple case analysis, we have the following.
Observations: 1.
For any i, there exists a setting of w1, w2 an w3 such that of the S securities only Si pays off.
2.
For any setting of w1, w2 and w3, at least one of the S securities will pay off.
3.
If w1, w2 and w3 are all false, all of the S securities will pay off.
4.
Setting one of w1, w2 or w3 to be true, and the others to be 0, will cause exactly one of the S securities to pay off.
By Observation 1, there is no point in buying a nonempty proper subset of the S securities: The adversary can ensure that none of the bought securities will pay off, and even if all the S securities pay off, it will not be sufficient to recoup the cost of buying a single S security.
By Observation 2, if one buys all the S securities, one is guaranteed to almost make back ones investment (except for 2), in which case by Observations 3 and 4, the adversaries optimal strategy is to make exactly one of w1, w2 or w3 true.
We set C, and 2 so that Cn + (|cheap securities|) + 2(|clauses|) < 1.
Thus, the accumulated losses of 2 can never spell the difference between making a guaranteed profit and making no profit at all.
Note also that by making 2 positive we prevent the existence of break-even buying strategies in which the buyer only purchases S securities.
Summarizing the previous argument, we may assume without loss of generality that the buyer buys all of the S securities (for all clauses), and that for each clause the adversary sets exactly one of that clause``s auxiliary variables w1, w2 or w3 to be true.
For the rest of the discussion, we assume that the players follow these constraints.
We next claim that a rational buyer will either buy all of S1, S2 or S3, or none of them.
If the buyer doesn``t buy S1, then if the adversary makes w1 true and w2 and w3 false, neither S2 nor S3 will pay off, regardless of how the adversary sets X, Y and Z. Hence, there is no point in buying either S2 or S3 if one doesn``t buy S1.
Applying the same argument to S2 and S3 establishes the claim.
Clearly, buying none of S1, S2 and S3 has, up to negligible 2 factors, the same price/payoff behavior as not buying S.
We next argue that, subject to the established constraints put on the players'' behaviors, buying all of S1, S2 and S3 has the same price/payoff behavior (again ignoring 2 factors) as buying S, regardless of how the adversary sets X, Y and Z. First, in both cases, the cost is c.
If the adversary makes X, Y and Z true, then S pays off 1, and (assuming that exactly one of w1, w2 and w3 is true), exactly one of S1, S2 or S3 will pay off 1.
If X is false, then S doesn``t pay off, and the adversary can set w1 true (and w2 and w3 false), ensuring that none of S1, S2 and S3 pays off.
The same argument holds if Y or Z are false.
6.
TRACTABLE CASES The logical question to ask in light of these complexity results is whether further, more severe restrictions on the space of securities can enable tractable matching algorithms.
Although we have not systematically explored the possibilities, the potential for useful tractable cases certainly exists.
Suppose, for example, that bids are limited to unit quantities of securities of the following two forms: 1.
Disjunctions of positive events: A1 ∨ · · · ∨ Ak .
2.
Single negative events: ¯Ai .
Let p be the price offered for a disjunction A1 ∨ · · · ∨ Ak , and qi the maximal price offered for the respective negated disjuncts.
This disjunction bid is part of a match iff p +P i qi ≥ k. Evaluating whether this condition is satisfied by a subset of bids is quite straightforward.
Although this example is contrived, its application is not entirely implausible.
For example, the disjunctions may correspond to insurance customers, who want an insurance contract to cover all the potential causes of their asset loss.
The atomic securities are sold by insurers, each of whom specialize in a different form of disaster cause.
7.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS We have analyzed the computational complexity of matching for securities based on logical formulas.
Many possible avenues for future work exist, including 1.
Analyzing the agents'' optimization problem: • How to choose quantities and bid/ask prices for a collection of securities to maximizes one``s expected utility, both for linear and nonlinear utility functions.
153 • How to choose securities; that is, deciding on what collection of boolean formulas to offer to trade, subject to constraints or penalties on the number or complexity of bids.
• How do make the above choices in a game theoretically sound way, taking into account the choices of other traders, their reasoning about other traders, etc. 2.
Although matching is likely intractable, are there good heuristics that achieve matches in many cases or approximate a matching?
3.
Exploring sharing rules for dividing the surplus, and incentive properties of the resulting mechanisms.
4.
We may consider a market to be in computational equilibrium if no computationally-bounded player can find a strategy that increases utility.
With few exceptions [3, 22], little is known about computational equilibriums.
A natural question is to determine whether a market can achieve a computational equilibrium that is not a true equilibrium, and under what circumstances this may occur.
Acknowledgments We thank Rahul Sami for his help with Section 5.4.4.
We thank Rahul, Joan Feigenbaum and Robin Hanson for useful discussions.
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[25] David M. Pennock, Steve Lawrence, Finn ˚Arup Nielsen, and C. Lee Giles.
Extracting collective probabilistic forecasts from web games.
In Seventh International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pages 174-183, 2001.
[26] David M. Pennock and Michael P. Wellman.
Compact securities markets for Pareto optimal reallocation of risk.
In Sixteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, pages 481-488, 2000.
[27] C. R. Plott, J. Wit, and W. C. Yang.
Parimutuel betting markets as information aggregation devices: Experimental results.
Social Science Working Paper 986, California Institute of Technology, April 1997.
154 [28] Charles R. Plott.
Markets as information gathering tools.
Southern Economic Journal, 67(1):1-15, 2000.
[29] Charles R. Plott and Shyam Sunder.
Rational expectations and the aggregation of diverse information in laboratory security markets.
Econometrica, 56(5):1085-1118, 1988.
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Orange juice and weather.
American Economic Review, 74(5):861-880, 1984.
[31] Tuomas Sandholm, Subhash Suri, Andrew Gilpin, and David Levine.
Winner determination in combinatorial auction generalizations.
In First International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), July 2002.
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How accurate do markets predict the outcome of an event?
the Euro 2000 soccer championships experiment.
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155

Betting Boolean-Style: A Framework for Trading in Securities Based on Logical Formulas
ABSTRACT
We develop a framework for trading in compound securities: financial instruments that pay off contingent on the outcomes of arbitrary statements in propositional logic.
Buying or selling securities--which can be thought of as betting on or against a particular future outcome--allows agents both to hedge risk and to profit (in expectation) on subjective predictions.
A compound securities market allows agents to place bets on arbitrary boolean combinations of events, enabling them to more closely achieve their optimal risk exposure, and enabling the market as a whole to more closely achieve the social optimum.
The tradeoff for allowing such expressivity is in the complexity of the agents' and auctioneer's optimization problems.
We develop and motivate the concept of a compound securities market, presenting the framework through a series of formal definitions and examples.
We then analyze in detail the auctioneer's matching problem.
We show that, with n events, the matching problem is co-NP-complete in the divisible case and Σp2-complete in the indivisible case.
We show that the latter hardness result holds even under severe language restrictions on bids.
With log n events, the problem is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case.
We briefly discuss matching algorithms and tractable special cases.
1.
INTRODUCTION
Securities markets effectively allow traders to place bets on the outcomes of uncertain future propositions.
Examples include stock markets like NASDAQ, options markets like CBOE [17], futures markets like CME [30], other derivatives markets, insurance markets, political stock markets [11, 12], sports betting markets [7, 13, 32], horse racing markets [33], idea futures markets [16], decision markets [14] and even market games [4, 24, 25].
The economic value of securities markets is two-fold.
First, they allow traders to hedge risk, or to insure against undesirable outcomes.
For example, the owner of a stock might buy a put option (the right to sell the stock at a particular price) in order to insure against a stock downturn.
Or the owner of a house may purchase an insurance contract to hedge against unforeseen damage to the house.
Second, securities markets allow traders to speculate, or to obtain a subjective expected profit when market prices do not reflect their assessment of the likelihood of future outcomes.
For example, a trader might buy a call option if he believes that the likelihood is high that the price of the underlying stock will go up, regardless of risk exposure to changes in the stock price.
Because traders stand to earn a profit if they can make effective probability assessments, often prices in financial markets yield very accurate aggregate forecasts of future events [10, 29, 27, 28].
Real securities markets have complex payoff structures with various triggers.
However, these can all be modeled as collections of more basic or atomic Arrow-Debreu securities [1, 8, 20].
One unit of one Arrow-Debreu security pays off one dollar if and only if (iff) a corresponding binary event occurs; it pays nothing if the event does not occur.
So, for example, one unit of a security denoted (Acme100) might pay $1 iff Acme's stock is above $100 on January 4, 2004.
An Acme stock option as it would be defined on a finan
cial exchange can be though of as a portfolio of such atomic securities .1 In this paper, we develop and analyze a framework for trading in compound securities markets with payoffs contingent on arbitrary logical combinations of events, including conditionals.
For example, given binary events A, B, and C, one trader might bid to buy three units of a security denoted (A n B ¯ V C) that pays off $1 iff the compound event A n B ¯ V C occurs for thirty cents each.
Another trader may bid to sell six units of a security (AIC) that pays off $1 iff A occurs for fifty-five cents each, conditional on event C occurring, meaning that the transaction is revoked if C does not occur (i.e., no payoff is given and the price of the security is refunded) [5].
Bids may also be divisible, meaning that bidders are willing to accept less than the requested quantity, or indivisible, meaning that bids must be fulfilled either completely or not at all.
Given a set of such bids, the auctioneer faces a complex matching problem to decide which bids are accepted for how many units at what price.
Typically, the auctioneer seeks to take on no risk of its own, only matching up agreeable trades among the bidders, but we also consider alternative formulations where the auctioneer acts as a market maker willing to accept some risk.
We examine the computational complexity of the auctioneer's matching problem.
Let the length of the description of all the available securities be O (n).
With n events, the matching problem is co-NP-complete in the divisible case and Ep2-complete in the indivisible case.
This Ep2-complete hardness holds even when the bidding language is significantly restricted.
With log n events, the problem is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case.
Section 2 presents some necessary background information, motivation, and related work.
Section 3 formally describes our framework for compound securities, and defines the auctioneer's matching problem.
Section 4 briefly discusses natural algorithms for solving the matching problem.
Section 5 proves our central computational complexity results.
Section 6 discusses the possibility of tractable special cases.
Section 7 concludes with a summary and some ideas of future directions.
2.
PRELIMINARIES
2.1 Background and notation
Imagine a world where there are only two future uncertain events of any consequence: (1) the event that one's house is struck by lightning by December 31, 2003, denoted struck, and (2) the event that Acme's stock price goes above $100 by January 4, 2004, denoted acme100.
In this simple world there are four possible future states--all possible combinations of the binary events' outcomes: struck n acme100, struck n acme100, struck n acme100, struck n acme100.
Hedging risk can be thought of as an action of moving money between various possible future states.
For example, insur1Technically, an option is a portfolio of infinitely many atomic securities, though it can be approximately modeled with a finite number.
ing one's house transfers money from future states where struck is not true to states where it is.
Selling a security denoted (acme100)--that pays off $1 iff the event acme100 occurs--transfers money from future states where Acme's price is above $100 on January 4 to states where it's not.
Speculating is also an act of transferring money between future states, though usually associated with maximizing expected return rather than reducing risk.
For example, betting on a football team moves money from the "team loses" state to the "team wins" state.
In practice, agents engage in a mixture of hedging and speculating, and there is no clear dividing line between the two [18].
All possible future outcomes form a state space Ω, consisting of mutually exclusive and exhaustive states ω E Ω.
Often a more natural way to think of possible future outcomes is as an event space A of linearly independent events A E A that may overlap arbitrarily.
So in our toy example struck n acme100 is one of the four disjoint states, while struck is one of the two events.
Note that a set of n linearly independent events defines a state space Ω of size 2" consisting of all possible combinations of event outcomes.
Conversely, any state space Ω can be factored into [log lΩll events.
Suppose that A exhaustively covers all meaningful future outcomes (i.e., covers all eventualities that agents may wish to hedge against and/or speculate upon).
Then the existence of 2" linearly independent securities--called a complete market--allows agents to distribute their wealth arbitrarily across future states .2 An agent may create any hedge or speculation it desires.
Under classical conditions, agents trading in a complete market form an equilibrium where risk is allocated Pareto optimally.
If the market is incomplete, meaning it consists of fewer than 2" linearly independent securities, then in general agents cannot construct arbitrary hedges and equilibrium allocations may be nonoptimal [1, 8, 19, 20].
In real-world settings, the number of meaningful events n is large and thus the number of securities required for completeness is intractable.
No truly complete market exists or will ever exist.
One motivation behind compound securities markets is to provide a mechanism that supports the most transfer of risk using the least number of transactions possible.
Compound securities allow a high degree of expressivity in constructing bids.
The tradeoff for increased expressivity is increased computational complexity, from both the bidder's and auctioneer's point of view.
2.2 Related work
The quest to reduce the number of financial instruments required to support an optimal allocation of risk dates to Arrow's original work [1].
The requirement stated above of "only" 2" linearly-independent securities is itself a reduction from the most straightforward formulation.
In an economy with k standard goods, the most straightforward complete market contains k • 2" securities, each paying off in one good under one state realization.
Arrow [1] showed that a market where securities and goods are essentially separated, with 2" securities paying off in a single numeraire good plus k spot markets in the standard goods, is also complete.
For our purposes, we need consider only the securities market.
2By linearly independent securities, we mean that the vectors of payoffs in all future states of these securities are linearly independent.
Varian [34] shows that a complete market can be constructed using fewer than 2n securities, replacing the missing securities with options.
Still, the number of linearly independent financial instruments--securities plus options--must be 2n to guarantee completeness.
Though the requirement of 2n financial instruments cannot be relaxed if one wants to guarantee completeness in all circumstances, Pennock and Wellman [26] explore conditions under which a smaller securities market may be operationally complete, meaning that its equilibrium is Pareto optimal with respect to the agents involved, even if the market contains less than 2n securities.
The authors show that in some cases the market can be structured and "compacted" in analogy to Bayesian network representations of joint probability distributions [23].
They show that, if all agents' risk-neutral independencies agree with the independencies encoded in the market structure, then the market is operationally complete.
For collections of agents all with constant absolute risk aversion, agreement on Markov independencies is sufficient.
Bossaerts, Fine, and Ledyard [2] develop a mechanism they call combined-value trading (CVT) that allows traders to order an arbitrary portfolio of securities in one bid, rather than breaking up the order into a sequence of bids on individual securities.
If the portfolio order is accepted, all of the implied trades on individual securities are executed simultaneously, thus eliminating so-called execution risk that prices will change in the middle of a planned sequence of orders.
The authors conduct laboratory experiments showing that, even in thin markets where ordinary sequential trading breaks down, CVT supports efficient pricing and allocation.
Note that CVT differs significantly from compound securities trading.
CVT allows instantaneous trading of any linear combination of securities, while compound securities allow more expressive securities that can encode nonlinear boolean combinations of events.
For example, CVT may allow an agent to order securities (A) and (B) in a bundle that pays off as a linear combination of A and B,3 but CVT won't allow the construction of a compound security (A n B) that pays off $1 iff both A and B occur, or a compound security (AIB).
Related to CVT are combinatorial auctions [6, 21] and exchanges [31], mechanisms that have recently received quite a bit of attention in the economics and computer science literatures.
Combinatorial auctions allow bidders to place distinct values on all possible bundles of goods rather than just on individual goods.
In this way bidders can express substitutability and complementarity relationships among goods that cannot be expressed in standard parallel or sequential auctions.
Compound securities differ from combinatorial auctions in concept and complexity.
Compound securities allow bidders to construct an arbitrary bet on any of the 22n possible compound events expressible as logical functions of the n base events, conditional on any other of the 22n compound events.
Agents optimize based on their own subjective probabilities and risk attitude (and in general, their beliefs about other agents' beliefs and utilities, ad infinitum).
The central auctioneer problem is identifying arbitrage opportunities: that is, to match bets together without taking on any risk.
Combinatorial auctions, on the other hand, allow bids on any of the 2n bundles of n goods.
Typically, 3Specifically, one unit of each pays off $2 iff both A and B occur, $1 iff A or B occurs (but not both), and $0 otherwise.
uncertainty--and thus risk--is not considered.
The central auctioneer problem is to maximize social welfare.
Also note that the problems lie in different complexity classes.
While clearing a combinatorial auction is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case, matching in a compound securities market is NP-complete in the divisible case and Ep2-complete in the indivisible case.
In fact, even the problem of deciding whether two bids on compound securities match, even in the divisible case, is NP-complete (see Section 5.2).
There is a sense in which it is possible to translate our matching problem for compound securities into an analogous problem for clearing two-sided combinatorial exchanges [31] of exponential size.
Specifically, if we regard payoff in a particular state as a good, then compound securities can be viewed as bundles of (fractional quantities of) such goods.
The material balance constraint facing the combinatorial auctioneer corresponds to a restriction that the compoundsecurity auctioneer be disallowed from assuming any risk.
Note that this translation is not at all useful for addressing the compound-security matching problem, as the resulting combinatorial exchange has an exponential number of goods.
Hanson [15] develops a market mechanism called a market scoring rule that is especially well suited for allowing bets on a combinatorial number of outcomes.
The mechanism maintains a joint probability distribution over all 2n states, either explicitly or implicitly using a Bayesian network or other compact representation.
At any time any trader who believes the probabilities are wrong can change any part of the distribution by accepting a lottery ticket that pays off according to a scoring rule (e.g., the logarithmic scoring rule) [35], as long as that trader also agrees to pay off the most recent person to change the distribution.
In the limit of a single trader, the mechanism behaves like a scoring rule, suitable for polling a single agent for its probability distribution.
In the limit of many traders, it produces a combined estimate.
Since the market essentially always has a complete set of posted prices for all possible outcomes, the mechanism avoids the problem of thin markets, or illiquidity, that necessarily plagues any market containing an exponential number of alternative investments.
The mechanism requires a patron to pay off the final person to change the distribution, though the patron's payment is bounded.
Though Hanson offers some initial suggestions, several open problems remain, including efficient methods for representing and updating the joint distribution and recording traders positions and portfolios, without resorting to exponential time and space algorithms.
Fagin, Halpern, and Megiddo [9] give a sound and complete axiomatization for deciding whether sets of probabilistic inequalities are consistent.
Bids for compound securities can be thought of as expressions of probabilistic inequalities: for example, a bid to buy (A n B) at price 0.3 is a statement that the probability of A n B is greater than 0.3.
If a set of single-unit bids correspond to a set of inconsistent probabilistic inequalities, then there is a match.
However, because they are interested in a much different framework, Fagin et al. do not consider several complicating factors specific to the securities market framework: namely, handling multi-unit or fractional bid quantities, identifying matches, choosing among multiple matches, and optimizing based on probabilities and risk attitudes.
We address these issues below.
3.
FRAMEWORK FOR TRADING IN COMPOUND SECURITIES
3.1 High-level description
3.2 Formal description
3.2.1 Securities
3.2.2 Orders
3.2.3 The matching problem
4.
MATCHING ALGORITHMS
5.
THE COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY OF MATCHING
5.1 Small number of securities with divisible orders
5.2 Large number of securities with divisible orders
5.3 Small number of securities with indivisible orders
5.4 Large Number of Securities with Indivisible Orders
5.4.1 The basic reduction
5.4.2 Reducing to 3-variable conjunctions
5.4.3 Reducing to equi-cost securities
5.4.4 Reducing to clauses of at most 2 variables
Observations:
6.
TRACTABLE CASES
7.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

Betting Boolean-Style: A Framework for Trading in Securities Based on Logical Formulas
ABSTRACT
We develop a framework for trading in compound securities: financial instruments that pay off contingent on the outcomes of arbitrary statements in propositional logic.
Buying or selling securities--which can be thought of as betting on or against a particular future outcome--allows agents both to hedge risk and to profit (in expectation) on subjective predictions.
A compound securities market allows agents to place bets on arbitrary boolean combinations of events, enabling them to more closely achieve their optimal risk exposure, and enabling the market as a whole to more closely achieve the social optimum.
The tradeoff for allowing such expressivity is in the complexity of the agents' and auctioneer's optimization problems.
We develop and motivate the concept of a compound securities market, presenting the framework through a series of formal definitions and examples.
We then analyze in detail the auctioneer's matching problem.
We show that, with n events, the matching problem is co-NP-complete in the divisible case and Σp2-complete in the indivisible case.
We show that the latter hardness result holds even under severe language restrictions on bids.
With log n events, the problem is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case.
We briefly discuss matching algorithms and tractable special cases.
1.
INTRODUCTION
Securities markets effectively allow traders to place bets on the outcomes of uncertain future propositions.
The economic value of securities markets is two-fold.
First, they allow traders to hedge risk, or to insure against undesirable outcomes.
For example, the owner of a stock might buy a put option (the right to sell the stock at a particular price) in order to insure against a stock downturn.
Second, securities markets allow traders to speculate, or to obtain a subjective expected profit when market prices do not reflect their assessment of the likelihood of future outcomes.
For example, a trader might buy a call option if he believes that the likelihood is high that the price of the underlying stock will go up, regardless of risk exposure to changes in the stock price.
Because traders stand to earn a profit if they can make effective probability assessments, often prices in financial markets yield very accurate aggregate forecasts of future events [10, 29, 27, 28].
Real securities markets have complex payoff structures with various triggers.
However, these can all be modeled as collections of more basic or atomic Arrow-Debreu securities [1, 8, 20].
One unit of one Arrow-Debreu security pays off one dollar if and only if (iff) a corresponding binary event occurs; it pays nothing if the event does not occur.
So, for example, one unit of a security denoted (Acme100) might pay $1 iff Acme's stock is above $100 on January 4, 2004.
An Acme stock option as it would be defined on a finan
cial exchange can be though of as a portfolio of such atomic securities .1 In this paper, we develop and analyze a framework for trading in compound securities markets with payoffs contingent on arbitrary logical combinations of events, including conditionals.
For example, given binary events A, B, and C, one trader might bid to buy three units of a security denoted (A n B ¯ V C) that pays off $1 iff the compound event A n B ¯ V C occurs for thirty cents each.
Given a set of such bids, the auctioneer faces a complex matching problem to decide which bids are accepted for how many units at what price.
Typically, the auctioneer seeks to take on no risk of its own, only matching up agreeable trades among the bidders, but we also consider alternative formulations where the auctioneer acts as a market maker willing to accept some risk.
We examine the computational complexity of the auctioneer's matching problem.
Let the length of the description of all the available securities be O (n).
With n events, the matching problem is co-NP-complete in the divisible case and Ep2-complete in the indivisible case.
This Ep2-complete hardness holds even when the bidding language is significantly restricted.
With log n events, the problem is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case.
Section 2 presents some necessary background information, motivation, and related work.
Section 3 formally describes our framework for compound securities, and defines the auctioneer's matching problem.
Section 4 briefly discusses natural algorithms for solving the matching problem.
Section 5 proves our central computational complexity results.
Section 6 discusses the possibility of tractable special cases.
Section 7 concludes with a summary and some ideas of future directions.
2.
PRELIMINARIES
2.1 Background and notation
In this simple world there are four possible future states--all possible combinations of the binary events' outcomes: struck n acme100, struck n acme100, struck n acme100, struck n acme100.
Hedging risk can be thought of as an action of moving money between various possible future states.
For example, insur1Technically, an option is a portfolio of infinitely many atomic securities, though it can be approximately modeled with a finite number.
ing one's house transfers money from future states where struck is not true to states where it is.
Selling a security denoted (acme100)--that pays off $1 iff the event acme100 occurs--transfers money from future states where Acme's price is above $100 on January 4 to states where it's not.
Speculating is also an act of transferring money between future states, though usually associated with maximizing expected return rather than reducing risk.
For example, betting on a football team moves money from the "team loses" state to the "team wins" state.
All possible future outcomes form a state space Ω, consisting of mutually exclusive and exhaustive states ω E Ω.
Often a more natural way to think of possible future outcomes is as an event space A of linearly independent events A E A that may overlap arbitrarily.
So in our toy example struck n acme100 is one of the four disjoint states, while struck is one of the two events.
Note that a set of n linearly independent events defines a state space Ω of size 2" consisting of all possible combinations of event outcomes.
Conversely, any state space Ω can be factored into [log lΩll events.
Suppose that A exhaustively covers all meaningful future outcomes (i.e., covers all eventualities that agents may wish to hedge against and/or speculate upon).
Then the existence of 2" linearly independent securities--called a complete market--allows agents to distribute their wealth arbitrarily across future states .2 An agent may create any hedge or speculation it desires.
Under classical conditions, agents trading in a complete market form an equilibrium where risk is allocated Pareto optimally.
If the market is incomplete, meaning it consists of fewer than 2" linearly independent securities, then in general agents cannot construct arbitrary hedges and equilibrium allocations may be nonoptimal [1, 8, 19, 20].
In real-world settings, the number of meaningful events n is large and thus the number of securities required for completeness is intractable.
No truly complete market exists or will ever exist.
One motivation behind compound securities markets is to provide a mechanism that supports the most transfer of risk using the least number of transactions possible.
Compound securities allow a high degree of expressivity in constructing bids.
The tradeoff for increased expressivity is increased computational complexity, from both the bidder's and auctioneer's point of view.
2.2 Related work
The quest to reduce the number of financial instruments required to support an optimal allocation of risk dates to Arrow's original work [1].
The requirement stated above of "only" 2" linearly-independent securities is itself a reduction from the most straightforward formulation.
In an economy with k standard goods, the most straightforward complete market contains k • 2" securities, each paying off in one good under one state realization.
Arrow [1] showed that a market where securities and goods are essentially separated, with 2" securities paying off in a single numeraire good plus k spot markets in the standard goods, is also complete.
For our purposes, we need consider only the securities market.
2By linearly independent securities, we mean that the vectors of payoffs in all future states of these securities are linearly independent.
Varian [34] shows that a complete market can be constructed using fewer than 2n securities, replacing the missing securities with options.
Still, the number of linearly independent financial instruments--securities plus options--must be 2n to guarantee completeness.
The authors show that in some cases the market can be structured and "compacted" in analogy to Bayesian network representations of joint probability distributions [23].
They show that, if all agents' risk-neutral independencies agree with the independencies encoded in the market structure, then the market is operationally complete.
For collections of agents all with constant absolute risk aversion, agreement on Markov independencies is sufficient.
Bossaerts, Fine, and Ledyard [2] develop a mechanism they call combined-value trading (CVT) that allows traders to order an arbitrary portfolio of securities in one bid, rather than breaking up the order into a sequence of bids on individual securities.
If the portfolio order is accepted, all of the implied trades on individual securities are executed simultaneously, thus eliminating so-called execution risk that prices will change in the middle of a planned sequence of orders.
The authors conduct laboratory experiments showing that, even in thin markets where ordinary sequential trading breaks down, CVT supports efficient pricing and allocation.
Note that CVT differs significantly from compound securities trading.
CVT allows instantaneous trading of any linear combination of securities, while compound securities allow more expressive securities that can encode nonlinear boolean combinations of events.
For example, CVT may allow an agent to order securities (A) and (B) in a bundle that pays off as a linear combination of A and B,3 but CVT won't allow the construction of a compound security (A n B) that pays off $1 iff both A and B occur, or a compound security (AIB).
Combinatorial auctions allow bidders to place distinct values on all possible bundles of goods rather than just on individual goods.
Compound securities differ from combinatorial auctions in concept and complexity.
Compound securities allow bidders to construct an arbitrary bet on any of the 22n possible compound events expressible as logical functions of the n base events, conditional on any other of the 22n compound events.
Agents optimize based on their own subjective probabilities and risk attitude (and in general, their beliefs about other agents' beliefs and utilities, ad infinitum).
The central auctioneer problem is identifying arbitrage opportunities: that is, to match bets together without taking on any risk.
Combinatorial auctions, on the other hand, allow bids on any of the 2n bundles of n goods.
uncertainty--and thus risk--is not considered.
The central auctioneer problem is to maximize social welfare.
Also note that the problems lie in different complexity classes.
While clearing a combinatorial auction is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case, matching in a compound securities market is NP-complete in the divisible case and Ep2-complete in the indivisible case.
In fact, even the problem of deciding whether two bids on compound securities match, even in the divisible case, is NP-complete (see Section 5.2).
There is a sense in which it is possible to translate our matching problem for compound securities into an analogous problem for clearing two-sided combinatorial exchanges [31] of exponential size.
Specifically, if we regard payoff in a particular state as a good, then compound securities can be viewed as bundles of (fractional quantities of) such goods.
The material balance constraint facing the combinatorial auctioneer corresponds to a restriction that the compoundsecurity auctioneer be disallowed from assuming any risk.
Note that this translation is not at all useful for addressing the compound-security matching problem, as the resulting combinatorial exchange has an exponential number of goods.
Hanson [15] develops a market mechanism called a market scoring rule that is especially well suited for allowing bets on a combinatorial number of outcomes.
The mechanism maintains a joint probability distribution over all 2n states, either explicitly or implicitly using a Bayesian network or other compact representation.
In the limit of a single trader, the mechanism behaves like a scoring rule, suitable for polling a single agent for its probability distribution.
In the limit of many traders, it produces a combined estimate.
Since the market essentially always has a complete set of posted prices for all possible outcomes, the mechanism avoids the problem of thin markets, or illiquidity, that necessarily plagues any market containing an exponential number of alternative investments.
Bids for compound securities can be thought of as expressions of probabilistic inequalities: for example, a bid to buy (A n B) at price 0.3 is a statement that the probability of A n B is greater than 0.3.
If a set of single-unit bids correspond to a set of inconsistent probabilistic inequalities, then there is a match.
We address these issues below.

Betting Boolean-Style: A Framework for Trading in Securities Based on Logical Formulas
ABSTRACT
We develop a framework for trading in compound securities: financial instruments that pay off contingent on the outcomes of arbitrary statements in propositional logic.
Buying or selling securities--which can be thought of as betting on or against a particular future outcome--allows agents both to hedge risk and to profit (in expectation) on subjective predictions.
A compound securities market allows agents to place bets on arbitrary boolean combinations of events, enabling them to more closely achieve their optimal risk exposure, and enabling the market as a whole to more closely achieve the social optimum.
The tradeoff for allowing such expressivity is in the complexity of the agents' and auctioneer's optimization problems.
We develop and motivate the concept of a compound securities market, presenting the framework through a series of formal definitions and examples.
We then analyze in detail the auctioneer's matching problem.
We show that, with n events, the matching problem is co-NP-complete in the divisible case and Σp2-complete in the indivisible case.
We show that the latter hardness result holds even under severe language restrictions on bids.
With log n events, the problem is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case.
We briefly discuss matching algorithms and tractable special cases.
1.
INTRODUCTION
Securities markets effectively allow traders to place bets on the outcomes of uncertain future propositions.
Examples include stock markets like NASDAQ, options markets like CBOE [17], futures markets like CME [30], other derivatives markets, insurance markets, political stock markets [11, 12], sports betting markets [7, 13, 32], horse racing markets [33], idea futures markets [16], decision markets [14] and even market games [4, 24, 25].
The economic value of securities markets is two-fold.
First, they allow traders to hedge risk, or to insure against undesirable outcomes.
For example, the owner of a stock might buy a put option (the right to sell the stock at a particular price) in order to insure against a stock downturn.
Or the owner of a house may purchase an insurance contract to hedge against unforeseen damage to the house.
Second, securities markets allow traders to speculate, or to obtain a subjective expected profit when market prices do not reflect their assessment of the likelihood of future outcomes.
For example, a trader might buy a call option if he believes that the likelihood is high that the price of the underlying stock will go up, regardless of risk exposure to changes in the stock price.
Because traders stand to earn a profit if they can make effective probability assessments, often prices in financial markets yield very accurate aggregate forecasts of future events [10, 29, 27, 28].
Real securities markets have complex payoff structures with various triggers.
However, these can all be modeled as collections of more basic or atomic Arrow-Debreu securities [1, 8, 20].
One unit of one Arrow-Debreu security pays off one dollar if and only if (iff) a corresponding binary event occurs; it pays nothing if the event does not occur.
So, for example, one unit of a security denoted (Acme100) might pay $1 iff Acme's stock is above $100 on January 4, 2004.
An Acme stock option as it would be defined on a finan
cial exchange can be though of as a portfolio of such atomic securities .1 In this paper, we develop and analyze a framework for trading in compound securities markets with payoffs contingent on arbitrary logical combinations of events, including conditionals.
For example, given binary events A, B, and C, one trader might bid to buy three units of a security denoted (A n B ¯ V C) that pays off $1 iff the compound event A n B ¯ V C occurs for thirty cents each.
Another trader may bid to sell six units of a security (AIC) that pays off $1 iff A occurs for fifty-five cents each, conditional on event C occurring, meaning that the transaction is revoked if C does not occur (i.e., no payoff is given and the price of the security is refunded) [5].
Bids may also be divisible, meaning that bidders are willing to accept less than the requested quantity, or indivisible, meaning that bids must be fulfilled either completely or not at all.
Given a set of such bids, the auctioneer faces a complex matching problem to decide which bids are accepted for how many units at what price.
Typically, the auctioneer seeks to take on no risk of its own, only matching up agreeable trades among the bidders, but we also consider alternative formulations where the auctioneer acts as a market maker willing to accept some risk.
We examine the computational complexity of the auctioneer's matching problem.
Let the length of the description of all the available securities be O (n).
With n events, the matching problem is co-NP-complete in the divisible case and Ep2-complete in the indivisible case.
This Ep2-complete hardness holds even when the bidding language is significantly restricted.
With log n events, the problem is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case.
Section 2 presents some necessary background information, motivation, and related work.
Section 3 formally describes our framework for compound securities, and defines the auctioneer's matching problem.
Section 4 briefly discusses natural algorithms for solving the matching problem.
Section 5 proves our central computational complexity results.
Section 6 discusses the possibility of tractable special cases.
Section 7 concludes with a summary and some ideas of future directions.
2.
PRELIMINARIES
2.1 Background and notation
Imagine a world where there are only two future uncertain events of any consequence: (1) the event that one's house is struck by lightning by December 31, 2003, denoted struck, and (2) the event that Acme's stock price goes above $100 by January 4, 2004, denoted acme100.
In this simple world there are four possible future states--all possible combinations of the binary events' outcomes: struck n acme100, struck n acme100, struck n acme100, struck n acme100.
Hedging risk can be thought of as an action of moving money between various possible future states.
For example, insur1Technically, an option is a portfolio of infinitely many atomic securities, though it can be approximately modeled with a finite number.
ing one's house transfers money from future states where struck is not true to states where it is.
Selling a security denoted (acme100)--that pays off $1 iff the event acme100 occurs--transfers money from future states where Acme's price is above $100 on January 4 to states where it's not.
Speculating is also an act of transferring money between future states, though usually associated with maximizing expected return rather than reducing risk.
For example, betting on a football team moves money from the "team loses" state to the "team wins" state.
In practice, agents engage in a mixture of hedging and speculating, and there is no clear dividing line between the two [18].
All possible future outcomes form a state space Ω, consisting of mutually exclusive and exhaustive states ω E Ω.
Often a more natural way to think of possible future outcomes is as an event space A of linearly independent events A E A that may overlap arbitrarily.
So in our toy example struck n acme100 is one of the four disjoint states, while struck is one of the two events.
Note that a set of n linearly independent events defines a state space Ω of size 2" consisting of all possible combinations of event outcomes.
Conversely, any state space Ω can be factored into [log lΩll events.
Suppose that A exhaustively covers all meaningful future outcomes (i.e., covers all eventualities that agents may wish to hedge against and/or speculate upon).
Then the existence of 2" linearly independent securities--called a complete market--allows agents to distribute their wealth arbitrarily across future states .2 An agent may create any hedge or speculation it desires.
Under classical conditions, agents trading in a complete market form an equilibrium where risk is allocated Pareto optimally.
If the market is incomplete, meaning it consists of fewer than 2" linearly independent securities, then in general agents cannot construct arbitrary hedges and equilibrium allocations may be nonoptimal [1, 8, 19, 20].
In real-world settings, the number of meaningful events n is large and thus the number of securities required for completeness is intractable.
No truly complete market exists or will ever exist.
One motivation behind compound securities markets is to provide a mechanism that supports the most transfer of risk using the least number of transactions possible.
Compound securities allow a high degree of expressivity in constructing bids.
The tradeoff for increased expressivity is increased computational complexity, from both the bidder's and auctioneer's point of view.
2.2 Related work
The quest to reduce the number of financial instruments required to support an optimal allocation of risk dates to Arrow's original work [1].
The requirement stated above of "only" 2" linearly-independent securities is itself a reduction from the most straightforward formulation.
In an economy with k standard goods, the most straightforward complete market contains k • 2" securities, each paying off in one good under one state realization.
Arrow [1] showed that a market where securities and goods are essentially separated, with 2" securities paying off in a single numeraire good plus k spot markets in the standard goods, is also complete.
For our purposes, we need consider only the securities market.
2By linearly independent securities, we mean that the vectors of payoffs in all future states of these securities are linearly independent.
Varian [34] shows that a complete market can be constructed using fewer than 2n securities, replacing the missing securities with options.
Still, the number of linearly independent financial instruments--securities plus options--must be 2n to guarantee completeness.
Though the requirement of 2n financial instruments cannot be relaxed if one wants to guarantee completeness in all circumstances, Pennock and Wellman [26] explore conditions under which a smaller securities market may be operationally complete, meaning that its equilibrium is Pareto optimal with respect to the agents involved, even if the market contains less than 2n securities.
The authors show that in some cases the market can be structured and "compacted" in analogy to Bayesian network representations of joint probability distributions [23].
They show that, if all agents' risk-neutral independencies agree with the independencies encoded in the market structure, then the market is operationally complete.
For collections of agents all with constant absolute risk aversion, agreement on Markov independencies is sufficient.
Bossaerts, Fine, and Ledyard [2] develop a mechanism they call combined-value trading (CVT) that allows traders to order an arbitrary portfolio of securities in one bid, rather than breaking up the order into a sequence of bids on individual securities.
If the portfolio order is accepted, all of the implied trades on individual securities are executed simultaneously, thus eliminating so-called execution risk that prices will change in the middle of a planned sequence of orders.
The authors conduct laboratory experiments showing that, even in thin markets where ordinary sequential trading breaks down, CVT supports efficient pricing and allocation.
Note that CVT differs significantly from compound securities trading.
CVT allows instantaneous trading of any linear combination of securities, while compound securities allow more expressive securities that can encode nonlinear boolean combinations of events.
For example, CVT may allow an agent to order securities (A) and (B) in a bundle that pays off as a linear combination of A and B,3 but CVT won't allow the construction of a compound security (A n B) that pays off $1 iff both A and B occur, or a compound security (AIB).
Related to CVT are combinatorial auctions [6, 21] and exchanges [31], mechanisms that have recently received quite a bit of attention in the economics and computer science literatures.
Combinatorial auctions allow bidders to place distinct values on all possible bundles of goods rather than just on individual goods.
In this way bidders can express substitutability and complementarity relationships among goods that cannot be expressed in standard parallel or sequential auctions.
Compound securities differ from combinatorial auctions in concept and complexity.
Compound securities allow bidders to construct an arbitrary bet on any of the 22n possible compound events expressible as logical functions of the n base events, conditional on any other of the 22n compound events.
Agents optimize based on their own subjective probabilities and risk attitude (and in general, their beliefs about other agents' beliefs and utilities, ad infinitum).
The central auctioneer problem is identifying arbitrage opportunities: that is, to match bets together without taking on any risk.
Combinatorial auctions, on the other hand, allow bids on any of the 2n bundles of n goods.
Typically, 3Specifically, one unit of each pays off $2 iff both A and B occur, $1 iff A or B occurs (but not both), and $0 otherwise.
uncertainty--and thus risk--is not considered.
The central auctioneer problem is to maximize social welfare.
Also note that the problems lie in different complexity classes.
While clearing a combinatorial auction is polynomial in the divisible case and NP-complete in the indivisible case, matching in a compound securities market is NP-complete in the divisible case and Ep2-complete in the indivisible case.
In fact, even the problem of deciding whether two bids on compound securities match, even in the divisible case, is NP-complete (see Section 5.2).
There is a sense in which it is possible to translate our matching problem for compound securities into an analogous problem for clearing two-sided combinatorial exchanges [31] of exponential size.
Specifically, if we regard payoff in a particular state as a good, then compound securities can be viewed as bundles of (fractional quantities of) such goods.
The material balance constraint facing the combinatorial auctioneer corresponds to a restriction that the compoundsecurity auctioneer be disallowed from assuming any risk.
Note that this translation is not at all useful for addressing the compound-security matching problem, as the resulting combinatorial exchange has an exponential number of goods.
Hanson [15] develops a market mechanism called a market scoring rule that is especially well suited for allowing bets on a combinatorial number of outcomes.
The mechanism maintains a joint probability distribution over all 2n states, either explicitly or implicitly using a Bayesian network or other compact representation.
At any time any trader who believes the probabilities are wrong can change any part of the distribution by accepting a lottery ticket that pays off according to a scoring rule (e.g., the logarithmic scoring rule) [35], as long as that trader also agrees to pay off the most recent person to change the distribution.
In the limit of a single trader, the mechanism behaves like a scoring rule, suitable for polling a single agent for its probability distribution.
In the limit of many traders, it produces a combined estimate.
Since the market essentially always has a complete set of posted prices for all possible outcomes, the mechanism avoids the problem of thin markets, or illiquidity, that necessarily plagues any market containing an exponential number of alternative investments.
The mechanism requires a patron to pay off the final person to change the distribution, though the patron's payment is bounded.
Though Hanson offers some initial suggestions, several open problems remain, including efficient methods for representing and updating the joint distribution and recording traders positions and portfolios, without resorting to exponential time and space algorithms.
Fagin, Halpern, and Megiddo [9] give a sound and complete axiomatization for deciding whether sets of probabilistic inequalities are consistent.
Bids for compound securities can be thought of as expressions of probabilistic inequalities: for example, a bid to buy (A n B) at price 0.3 is a statement that the probability of A n B is greater than 0.3.
If a set of single-unit bids correspond to a set of inconsistent probabilistic inequalities, then there is a match.
However, because they are interested in a much different framework, Fagin et al. do not consider several complicating factors specific to the securities market framework: namely, handling multi-unit or fractional bid quantities, identifying matches, choosing among multiple matches, and optimizing based on probabilities and risk attitudes.
We address these issues below.
3.
FRAMEWORK FOR TRADING IN COMPOUND SECURITIES
3.1 High-level description
Common knowledge among agents is the set of events A.
There are no predefined securities.
Instead, agents offer to buy or sell securities of their own design that pay off contingent on logical combinations of events and event negations.
Combination operators may include conjunctions, disjunctions, and conditionals.
For all practical purposes, it is impossible for agents to trade in enough securities (2n) to form a complete market, so agents must devise their best tradeoff between the number and complexity of their bids, and the extent to which their risks are hedged and desirable bets are placed.
In its most general form, the problem is game-theoretic in nature, since what an agent should offer depends on what it believes other agents will accept.
At the other end of the spectrum, a simplified version of the problem is to optimize bids only on currently available securities at current prices.
In between these two formulations are other possible interesting optimization problems.
Approximation algorithms might also be pursued.
The auctioneer faces a nontrivial problem of matching buy and sell orders to maximize surplus (the cash and securities left over after accepted bids are fulfilled).
For example, offers to sell (A1A2) at $0.2 and (A1 ¯ A2) at $0.1 can match with an offer to buy (A1) at $0.4, with surplus $0.1.
Or an offer to sell (A1) at $0.3 can match with an offer to buy (A1A2) at $0.4, with surplus $0.1 in cash and (A1 ¯ A2) in securities.
In general, a single security might qualify for multiple matches, but only one can be transacted.
So the auctioneer must find the optimal set of matches that maximizes surplus, which could be measured in a number of ways.
Again, approximation algorithms might be considered.
In another formulation, the auctioneer functions as a market maker willing to take on a certain amount of risk.
Informally, our motivation is to provide a mechanism that allows a very high degree of expressivity in placing hedges and bets, and is also capable of approximating the optimal (complete-market) allocation of risk, trading off the number and complexity of securities and transactions needed.
3.2 Formal description
3.2.1 Securities
We use φ and ψ to denote arbitrary boolean formulas, or logical combinations of events in A.
We denote securities (φ | ψ).
Securities pay off $1 if and only if (iff) φ and ψ are true, pay off $0 iff φ is false and ψ is true, and are canceled (i.e., any price paid is refunded) iff ψ is false.
We define T = _ Ω to be the event "true" and F = _ 0 to be the event "false".
We abbreviate (φ | T) as (φ).
3.2.2 Orders
Agents place orders, denoted o, of the form "q units of (φ | ψ) at price p per unit", where q> 0 implies a buy order and q <0 implies a sell order.
We assume agents submitting buy (sell) orders will accept any price p ∗ <p (p ∗> p).
We distinguish between divisible and indivisible orders.
Agents submitting divisible orders will accept any quantity αq where 0 <α <1.
Agents submitting indivisible orders will accept only exactly q units, or none at all.
We believe that, given the nature of what is being traded (state-contingent dollars), most agents will be content to trade using divisible orders.
Every order o can be translated into a payoff vector Υ across all states ω E Ω.
The payoff Υ ~ ω ~ in state ω is q · 1ω ∈ ψ (1ω ∈ φ − p), where 1ω ∈ E equals 1 iff ω E E and zero otherwise.
Recall that the 2n states correspond to the 2n possible combinations of event outcomes.
We index multiple orders with subscripts (e.g., oi and Υi).
Let the set of all orders be O and the set of all corresponding payoff vectors be P.
3.2.3 The matching problem
The auctioneer's task, called the matching problem, is to determine which orders to accept among all orders o E O. Let αi be the fraction of order oi accepted by the auctioneer (in the indivisible case, αi must be either 0 or 1; in the divisible case, αi can range from 0 to 1).
If αi = 0, then order oi is considered rejected and no transactions take place concerning this order.
For accepted orders (αi> 0), the auctioneer receives the money lost by bidders and pays out the money won by bidders, so the auctioneer's payoff vector is:
We also call the auctioneer's payoff vector the surplus vector, since it is the (possibly state-contingent) money left over after all accepted orders are filled.
Assume that the auctioneer wants to choose a set of orders so that it is guaranteed not to lose any money in any future state, but that the auctioneer does not necessarily insist on obtaining a positive benefit from the transaction (i.e., the auctioneer is content to break even).
auc = c where c is nonnegative, then the surplus leftover after processing this match is c dollars.
Let m = minω [Υ ~ ω ~ auc].
In general, processing a match leaves m dollars in cash and Υ ~ ω ~ auc − m in state-contingent dollars, which can then be translated into securities.
The auctioneer's payoff" vector (the negative of the componentwise sum of the above two vectors) is:
Since all components are nonnegative, the two orders match.
The auctioneer can process both orders, leaving a surplus of $0.1 in cash and one unit of ~ A1 ¯ A2 ~ in securities.
❑ Now consider the divisible case, where order can be partially filled.
DEFINITION 2.
(Matching problem, divisible case) Given a set of orders O, does there exist αi ∈ [0, 1] with at least one αi> 0 such that
EXAMPLE 3.
(Divisible order matching) Suppose | A | = 2.
Consider an order to sell one unit of ~ A1 ~ at price $0.5, an order to buy one unit of ~ A1A2 | A1 ∨ A2 ~ at price $0.5, and an order to buy one unit of ~ A1 | ¯ A2 ~ at price $0.4.
The corresponding payoff" vectors are:
It is clear by inspection that no non-empty subset of whole orders constitutes a match: in all cases where αi ∈ {0, 1} (other than all αi = 0), at least one state sums to a positive amount (negative for the auctioneer).
However, if α1 = α2 = 3/5 and α3 = 1, then the auctioneer's payoff" vector is: Ta − Tg = ~ 0, 0, 0, 0.1 ~, constituting a match.
The auctioneer can process 3/5 of the first and second orders, and all of the third order, leaving a surplus of 0.1 units of ~ ¯ A1 ¯ A2 ~.
In this example, a divisible match exists even though an indivisible match is not possible; we examine the distinction in detail in Section 5, where we separate the two matching problems into distinct complexity classes.
❑ The matching problems defined above are decision problems: the task is only to show the existence or nonexistence of a match.
However, there may be multiple matches from which the auctioneer can choose.
Sometimes the choices are equivalent from the auctioneer's perspective; alternatively, an objective function can be used to find an optimal match according to that objective.
EXAMPLE 4.
(Auctioneer alternatives I) Suppose | A | = 2.
Consider an order to sell one unit of ~ A1 ~ at price $0.7, an order to sell one unit of ~ A2 ~ at price $0.7, an order to buy one unit of ~ A1A2 ~ at price $0.4, an order to buy one unit of ~ A1 ¯ A2 ~ at price $0.4, and an order to buy one unit
Consider the indivisible case.
The auctioneer could choose to accept bids 1, 3, and 4 together, or the auctioneer could choose to accept bids 2, 3, and 5 together.
Both constitute matches, and in fact both yield identical payoff "s (Tauc = ~ 0.1, 0.1, 0.1, 0.1 ~, or $0.1 in cash) for the auctioneer.
❑ EXAMPLE 5.
(Auctioneer alternatives II) Suppose | A | = 2.
Consider an order to sell two units of ~ A1 ~ at price $0.6, an order to buy one unit of ~ A1A2 ~ at price $0.3, and an order to buy one unit of ~ A1 ¯ A2 ~ at price $0.5.
The corresponding payoff" vectors are:
Consider the divisible case.
The auctioneer could choose to accept one unit each of all three bids, yielding a payoff" to the auctioneer of $0.2 in cash (Tauc = ~ 0.2, 0.2, 0.2, 0.2 ~).
Alternatively, the auctioneer could choose to accept 4/3 units of bid 1, and one unit each of bids 2 and 3, yielding a payoff" to the auctioneer of 1/3 units of security ~ A1 ~.
Both choices constitute matches (in fact, accepting any number of units of bid 1 between 1 and 4/3 can be part of a match), though depending on the auctioneer's objective, one choice might be preferred over another.
For example, if the auctioneer believes that A1 is very likely to occur, it may prefer to accept 4/3 units of bid 1.
❑ There are many possible criteria for the auctioneer to decide among matches, all of which seem reasonable in some circumstances.
One natural quantity to maximize is the volume of trade among bidders; another is the auctioneer's utility, either with or without the arbitrage constraint.
DEFINITION 3.
(Trade maximization problem) Given a set of indivisible (divisible) orders O, choose αi ∈ {0, 1} (αi ∈ [0, 1]) to maximize
cent of orders filled, or P Another reasonable variation is to maximize the total per
problem) Let the auctioneer's subjective probability for each state ω be Pr (ω), and let the auctioneer's utility for y dollars be u (y).
Given a set of indivisible (divisible) orders O, choose αi E {0, 11 (αi E [0, 1]) to maximize
This last objective function drops the risk-free (arbitrage) constraint.
In this case, the auctioneer is a market maker with beliefs about the likelihood of outcomes, and the auctioneer may actually lose money is some outcomes.
Still other variations and other optimization criteria seem reasonable, including social welfare, etc. .
It also seems reasonable to suppose that the surplus be shared among bidders and the auctioneer, rather than retained solely by the auctioneer.
This is analogous to choosing a common transaction price in a double auction (e.g., the midpoint between the bid and ask prices), rather than the buyer paying the bid price and the seller receiving the ask price, with the difference going to the auctioneer.
The problem becomes more complicated when dividing surplus securities, in part because they are valued differently by different agents.
Formulating reasonable sharing rules and examining the resulting incentive properties seems a rich and promising avenue for further investigation.
4.
MATCHING ALGORITHMS
The straightforward algorithm for solving the divisible matching problem is linear programming; we set up an appropriate linear program in Section 5.1.
The straightforward algorithm for solving the indivisible matching problem is integer programming.
With n events, to set up the appropriate linear or integer programs, simply writing out the payoff vectors in the straightforward way requires O (2n) space.
There is some hope that specialized algorithms that exploit structure among bids can perform better in terms of average-case time and space complexity.
For example, in some cases matches can be identified using logical reduction techniques, without writing down the full payoff vectors.
So a match between the following bids:
9 sell 1 of (A1A2) at $0.2 9 sell 1 of (A1 ¯ A2) at $0.1 9 buy 1 of (A1) at $0.4
can be identified by reducing the first two bids to an equivalent offer to sell (A1) at $0.3 that clearly matches with the third bid.
Formalizing a logical-reduction algorithm for matching, or other algorithms that can exploit special structure among the bids, is a promising avenue for future work.
5.
THE COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY OF MATCHING
In this section we examine the computational complexity of the auctioneer's matching problem.
Here n refers to the problem's input size that includes descriptions of all of the buy and sell orders.
We also assume that n bounds the number of base securities.
We consider four cases based on two parameters:
1.
Whether to allow divisible or indivisible orders.
2.
The number of securities.
We consider two possibilities: (a) O (log n) base securities yielding a polynomial number of states.
(b) An unlimited number of base securities yielding an exponential number of states.
We show the following results.
THEOREM 1.
The matching problem is
1.
computable in polynomial-time for O (log n) base securities with divisible orders.
2.
co-NP-complete for unlimited securities with divisible orders.
3.
NP-complete for O (log n) base securities with indivisible orders.
4.
Σp2-complete for unlimited securities with indivisible orders.
5.1 Small number of securities with divisible orders
We can build a linear program based on Definition 2.
We have variables αi.
For each i, we have
and for each state ω in Ω we have the constraint
A set of orders has a matching exactly when Pi αi> 0.
With O (log n) base securities, we have 1Ω1 bounded by a polynomial so we can solve this linear program in polynomial time.
Note that one might argue that one should maximize some linear combination of the Υ ~ ω) i s to maximize the surplus.
However this approach will not find matchings that have zero surplus.
5.2 Large number of securities with divisible orders
With unlimited base securities, the linear program given in Section 5.1 has an exponential number of constraint equations.
Each constraint is short to describe and easily computable given ω.
Let m <n be the total number of buy and sell orders.
By the theory of linear programming, an upper bound on the objective function can be forced by a collection of m +1 constraints.
So if no matching exists there must exist m + 1 constraints that force all the αi to zero.
In nondeterministic polynomial-time we can guess these constraints and solve the reduced linear program.
This shows that matching is in co-NP.
To show co-NP-completeness we reduce the NP-complete problem of Boolean formula satisfiability to the nonexistence of a matching.
Fix a formula φ.
Let the base securities be the variables of φ and consider the single security (φ) with a buy order of 0.5.
If the formula φ is satisfiable then there is some state with payoff 0.5 and no fractional unit of the security (φ) is a matching.
If the formula φ is not satisfiable then every state has an auctioneer's payoff of 0.5 and a single unit of the security (φ) is a matching.
One could argue that if the formula φ is not satisfiable then no fully rational buyer would want to buy (φ) for a cost of 0.5.
We can get around this problem by adding auxiliary base securities, A and B, and defining two securities
with separate buy orders of 0.5 on each.
If φ were satisfiable then in the state corresponding to the satisfying assignment and both A and B to be true, (τ) and (τ ~) both have an auctioneer's payoff of -0.5 so even no divisible matching can exist.
If φ were not satisfiable then one unit of each would be a matching since in every state at least one of (τ) or (τ ~) are false.
5.3 Small number of securities with indivisible orders
This case is easily seen to be in NP: Just nondeterministically guess a nonempty subset S of orders and check for each state ω in Ω that - Υ ~ ω ~ i> 0.
Since IΩI and ISI are bounded by a polynomial in n, the verification can be done in polynomial time.
To show that matching is NP-complete we reduce the NPcomplete problem EXACT COVER BY 3-SETS (X3C) to a matching of securities.
The input to X3C consists of a set X and a collection C of 3-element subsets of X.
The input (X, C) is in X3C if C contains an exact cover of X, i.e., there is a subcollection C ~ of C such that every element of X occurs in exactly one member of C ~.
Karp showed that X3C is NP-complete.
Suppose we have an instance (X, C) with the vector X = {x1,..., x3q} and C = {c1,..., cm}.
We set Ω = {e1,..., e3q, r, s} and define securities labelled (φ1),..., (φm), (ψ1),..., (ψq) and (τ), as follows:
• Security (φi) is true in state r, and is true in state ek if k is not in ci.
• Security (ψj) is true only in state s. • Security (τ) is true in each state ek but not r or s.
We have buy orders on each (φi) and (ψj) security for 0.5 - 1 and a buy order on (τ) for 0.5.
We claim that a matching exists if and only if (X, C) is in X3C.
If (X, C) is in X3C, let C ~ be the subcollection that covers each element of X exactly once.
Note that IC ~ I = q.
We claim the collection consisting of (φi) for each ci in C ~, every (ψj) and (τ) has a matching.
In each state ek we have an auctioneer's payoff of
In states r and s the auctioneer's payoffs are
Suppose now that (X, C) is not in X3C but there is a matching.
Consider the number q ~ of the (φi) in that matching and q ~ ~ the number of (ψj) in the matching.
Since a matching requires a nonempty subset of the orders and (τ) by itself is not a matching we have q ~ + q ~ ~> 0.
We have three cases.
5.4 Large Number of Securities with Indivisible Orders
The class Σp2 is the second level of the polynomial-time hierarchy.
A language L is in Σp2 if there exists a polynomial p and a set A in P such that x is in L if and only if there is a y with IyI = p (IxI) such that for all z, with IzI = p (IxI), (x, y, z) is in A.
The class Σp2 contains both NP and coNP.
Unless the polynomial-time hierarchy collapses (which is considered unlikely), a problem that is complete for Σp2 is not contained in NP or co-NP.
We will show that computing a matching is Σp2-complete, and remains so even for quite restricted types of securities, and hence is (likely) neither in NP or co-NP.
While it may seem that being NP-complete or co-NP-complete is "hard enough," there are further practical consequences of being outside of NP and co-NP.
If the matching problem were in NP, one could use heuristics to search for and verify a match if it exists; even if such heuristics fail in the worst case, they may succeed for most examples in practice.
Similarly, if the matching problem were in co-NP, one might hope to at least heuristically rule out the possibility of matching.
But for problems outside of NP or co-NP, there is no framework for verifying that a heuristically derived answer is correct.
Less formally, for NP (or co-NP) - complete problems, you have to be lucky; for Σp2-complete problems, you can't even tell if you've been lucky.
We note that the existence of a matching is in Σp2: We use y to choose a subset of the orders and z to represent a state ω with (x, y, z) in A if the set of orders has a total nonpositive auctioneer's payoff in state ω.
We prove a stronger theorem which implies that matching is in Σp 2.
Let S1,..., Sn be a set of securities, where each security Si has cost ci and pays off pi whenever formula Ci is satisfied.
The 0 − 1-matching problem asks whether one can, by accepting either 0 or 1 of each security, guarantee a worst-case payoff strictly larger than the total cost.
THEOREM 2.
The 0 − 1-matching problem is Σp2-complete.
Furthermore, the problem remains Σp2-complete under the following two special cases:
1.
For all i, Ci is a conjunction of 3 base events (or their negations), pi = 1, and ci = cj for all i and j. 2.
For all i, Ci is a conjunction of at most 2 base securities (or their negations).
These hardness results hold even if there is a promise that no subset of the securities guarantees a worst-case payoff identical to their cost.
To prove Theorem 2, we reduce from the "standard" Σp2 problem that we call T ∃ ∀ BF.
Given a boolean formula φ with variables x1,..., xn and y1,..., yn is the following fullyquantified formula true
is restricted to being a disjunction of conjunctions of at most 3 variables (or their negations), e.g.,
This form, without the bound on the conjunction size, is known as disjunctive normal form (DNF); the restriction to conjunctions of 3 variables is 3-DNF.
We reduce T ∃ ∀ BF to finding a matching.
For the simplest reduction, we consider the matching problem where one has a set of Arrow-Debreu securities whose payoff events are conjunctions of the base securities, or their negations.
The auctioneer has the option of accepting either 0 or 1 of each of the given securities.
We first reduce to the case where the payoff events are conjunctions of arbitrarily many base events (or their negations).
By a standard trick we can reduce the number of base events in each conjunction to 3, and with a slight twist we can even ensure that all securities have the same price as well as the same payoff.
Finally, we show that the problem remains hard even if only conjunctions of 2 variables are allowed, though with securities that deviate slightly from Arrow-Debreu securities in that they may have varying, non unit payoffs.
5.4.1 The basic reduction
Before describing the securities, we give some intuition.
The T ∃ ∀ BFproblem may be viewed as a game between a selector and an adversary.
The selector sets the xi variables, and then the adversary sets the yi variables so as to falsify the formula φ.
We can view the 0 − 1-matching problem as one in which the auctioneer is a buyer who buys securities corresponding to disjunctions of the base events, and then the adversary sets the values of the base events to minimize the payoff from the securities.
We construct our securities so that the optimal buying strategy is to buy n "expensive" securities along with a set of "cheap" securities, of negligible cost (for some cases we can modify the construction so that all securities have the same cost).
The total cost of the securities will be just under 1, and each security pays off 1, so the adversary must ensure that none of the securities pays off.
Each expensive security forces the adversary to set some variable, xi to a particular value to prevent the security from paying off; this corresponds to setting the xi variables in the original game.
The cheap securities are such that preventing every one of of these securities from paying off is equivalent to falsifyingφ in the original game.
Among the technical difficulties we face is how to prevent the buyer from buying conflicting securities, e.g., one that forces xi = 0 and the other that forces xi = 1, allowing for a trivial arbitrage.
Secondly, for our analysis we need to ensure that a trader cannot spend more to get more, say by spending 1.5 for a set of securities with the property that at least 2 securities pay off under all possible events.
For each of the variables {xi}, {yi} in φ, we add a corresponding base security (with the same labels).
For each existential variable xi we add additional base securities, ni and zi.
We also include a base security Q.
In our basic construction, each expensive security costs C and each cheap security costs ~; all securities pay off 1.
We require that Cn + ~ (| cheap securities |) <1 and C (n +1)> 1.
That is, one can buy n expensive securities and all of the cheap securities for less than 1, but one cannot buy n + 1 expensive securities for less than 1.
We at times refer to a security by its payoff clause.
Remark: We may loosely think of ~ as 0.
However, this would allow one to buy a security for nothing that pays (in the worst case) nothing.
By making ~> 0, we can show it hard to distinguish portfolios that guarantee a positive profit from those that risk a positive loss.
Setting ~> 0 will also allow us to show hardness results for the case where all securities have the same cost.
For 1 ≤ i ≤ n, we have two expensive securities with payoff clauses (¯ xi ∧ Q) and (¯ ni ∧ Q) and two cheap securities with payoff clauses (xi ∧ ¯ zi) and (ni ∧ ¯ zi).
For each clause C ∈ φ, we convert every negated variable ¯ xi into ni and add the conjunction z1 ∧ · · · ∧ zn.
Thus, for a clause C = (x2 ∧ ¯ x7 ∧ ¯ y5) we construct a cheap security SC, with payoff clause
Finally, we have a cheap security with payoff clause (¯ Q).
We now argue that a matching exists iff
We do this by successively constraining the buyer and the adversary, eliminating behaviors that would cause the other player to win.
The resulting "reasonable" strategies correspond exactly to the game version of T ∃ ∀ BF.
First, observe that if the adversary sets all of the base securities to false (0), then only the (¯ Q) security will pay off.
Thus, no buyer can buy more than n expensive securities and guarantee a profit.
The problem is thus whether one can buy n expensive securities and all the cheap securities, so that at for any setting of the base events at least one security will pay off.
Clearly, the adversary must make Q hold, or the (¯ Q) security will pay off.
Next, we claim that for each i, 1 <i <i, the auctioneer must buy at least one of the (¯ xi n Q) and (¯ ni n Q) securities.
This follow from the fact that if the adversary sets xi, ni and zi to be false, and every other base event to be true, then only the (¯ xi n Q) and (¯ ni n Q) securities will pay off.
As no auctioneer can buy more than n expensive securities, it must therefore buy exactly one of (¯ xi n Q) or (¯ ni n Q), for each i, 1 <i <n. For the rest of the analysis, we assume that the auctioneer follows this constraint.
Suppose that the buyer buys (¯ xi nQ).
Then the adversary must set xi to be true (since it must set Q to be true), or the security will pay off.
It must then set zi to be true or (xi n ¯ zi) will pay off.
Since the buyer doesn't buy (¯ ni n Q) (by the above constraint), and all the other securities pay the same or less when ni is made false, we can assume without loss of generality that the adversary sets ni to be false.
Similarly, if the buyer buys (¯ ni n Q), then the adversary must set ni and zi to be true, and we can assume without loss of generality that the adversary sets xi to be false.
Note that the adversary must in all cases set each zi event to be true.
Summarizing the preceding argument, there is an exact correspondence between the rational strategies of the buyer and settings for the xi variables forced on the adversary.
Furthermore, the adversary is also constrained to set the variables Q, z1,..., zn to be true, and without loss of generality may be assumed to set ni = ¯ xi.
Under these constraints, those securities not corresponding to clauses inφ are guaranteed to not pay off.
The adversary also decides the value of the y1,..., ym base events.
Recall that for each clause C G φ there is a corresponding security Sc.
Given that zi is true and ni = ¯ xi (without loss of generality), it follows from the construction of Sc that the setting of the yis causes Sc to pay off iff it satisfies C.
This establishes the reduction from T] VBF to the matching problem, when the securities are constrained to be a conjunction of polynomially many base events or their negations.
5.4.2 Reducing to 3-variable conjunctions
There are standard methods for reducing DNF formulae to 3-DNF formulae, which are trivially modifiable to our securities framework; we include the reduction for completeness.
Given a security S whose payoff clause is
(variable negations are irrelevant to this discussion), cost c and payoff p, introduce a new auxiliary variable, w, and replace the security with two securities, S1 and S2, with payoff clauses,
The securities both have payoff p, and their costs can be any positive values that sum to c. Note that at most one of the securities can pay off at a time.
If only one security is bought, then the adversary can always set w so that it won't pay off; hence the auctioneer will buy either both or neither, for a total cost of c (here we use the fact that one is only allowed to buy either 0 or 1 shares of each security).
Then, it may be verified that, given the ability to set w arbitrarily, the adversary can cause C to be unsatisfied iff it can cause both C1 and C2 to be unsatisfied.
Hence, owning one share each of S1 and S2 is equivalent to owning one share of S. Note that C1 has three variables and C2 has k − 1 variables.
By applying the transformation successively, one obtains an equivalent set of securities, of polynomial size, whose payoff clauses have at most 3 variables.
We note that in the basic construction, all of the clauses with more than 3 variables are associated with cheap securities (cost ~).
Instead of subdividing costs, we can simply make all of the resulting securities have cost ~; the constraints on C and ~ must reflect the new, larger number of cheap securities.
One can ensure that all of the payoff clauses have exactly 3 variables, with a similar construction.
A security S with cost c, payoff p and defining clause (x n y) can be replaced by securities S1 and S2 with cost c/2, payoff p and defining clauses (x n y n w) and (x n y n ¯ w), where w is a new auxiliary variable.
Essentially the same analysis as given above applies to this case.
The case of single-variable payoff clauses is handled by two applications of this technique.
5.4.3 Reducing to equi-cost securities
By setting C and ~ appropriately, one can ensure that in the basic reduction every security costs a polynomially bounded integer multiple of ~; call this ratio r.
We now show how to reduce this case to the case where every security costs ~.
Recall that the expensive securities have payoff clauses (¯ xi n Q) or (¯ ni n Q).
Assume that security S has payoff clause (¯ xi n Q) (the other case is handled identically).
Replace S with security S', with payoff clause (¯ xi n Q n w1) (w1,..., wr-1 are auxiliary variables; fresh variables are chosen for each clause), and also S1,..., Sr-1, with payoff clauses (¯ w1 n w2), (¯ w2 n w3),..., (¯ wr-2 n wr-1), and (¯ wr-1 n ¯ w1).
Clearly, buying none of the new securities is equivalent to not buying the original security.
We show that buying all of the new securities is equivalent to buying the original security, and that buying a proper, nonempty subset of the securities is irrational.
We first note that if the buyer buys securities S1,..., Sr-1, then the adversary must set w1 to be true, or one of the securities will pay off.
To see this, note that if wi is set to false, then (¯ wi nwi +1) will be true unless wi +1 is set to false; thus, setting w1 to false forces the adversary to set wr-1 to false, causing the final clause to be true.
Having set w1 true, the adversary can set w2,..., wr-1 to false, ensuring that none of the securities S1,..., Sr-1 pays out.
If wi is true, then (¯ xi n Q n w1) is equivalent to (¯ xi n Q).
So buying all of the replacement securities for ~ each is equivalent to buying the original security for ~ r.
It remains to show that buying a proper, nonempty subset of the securities is irrational.
If one doesn't buy S', then the adversary can set the w variables so that none of S1,..., Sr-1 will pay off; any money spent on these securities is wasted.
If one doesn't buy Sr-1, the adversary can set all w to false, in which case none of the new clauses will pay off, regardless of the value of xi and Q. Similarly, if one
doesn't buy Si, for 1 <i <r--2, the adversary can set wi +1 to be true, all the other w variables to be false, and again there is no payoff, regardless of the value of xi and Q. Thus, buying a proper subset of these securities will not increase ones payoff.
We note that this reduction can be combined trivially with the reduction that ensures that all of the defining clauses have 3 or fewer variables.
With a slightly messier argument, all of the defining clauses can be set up to have exactly 3 variables.
5.4.4 Reducing to clauses of at most 2 variables
If we allow securities to have variable payoffs and prices, we can reduce to the case where each security's payoff clause is a conjunction of at most 2 variables or their negations.
Given a security s with payoff clause (X A Y A Z), cost c and payoff 1, we introduce fresh auxiliary variables, w1, w2 and w3 (new variables are used for each clause) and replace S with the following securities:
• Securities S1, S2 and S3, each with cost c/3 and payoff 1, with respective payoff clauses (X A w1), (Y A w2) and (Z A w3).
• Securities S' 1,..., S' 6, each with cost 4 and payoff 24--E2, with payoff clauses,
Here, E2 is a tiny positive quantity, described later.
By a simple case analysis, we have the following.
Observations:
1.
For any i, there exists a setting of w1, w2 an w3 such that of the S' securities only Si' pays off.
2.
For any setting of w1, w2 and w3, at least one of the S' securities will pay off.
3.
If w1, w2 and w3 are all false, all of the S' securities will pay off.
4.
Setting one of w1, w2 or w3 to be true, and the others
to be 0, will cause exactly one of the S' securities to pay off.
By Observation 1, there is no point in buying a nonempty proper subset of the S' securities: The adversary can ensure that none of the bought securities will pay off, and even if all the S securities pay off, it will not be sufficient to recoup the cost of buying a single S' security.
By Observation 2, if one buys all the S' securities, one is guaranteed to almost make back ones investment (except for E2), in which case by Observations 3 and 4, the adversaries optimal strategy is to make exactly one of w1, w2 or w3 true.
We set C, e and E2 so that Cn + e (lcheap securitiesl) + E2 (lclausesl) <1.
Thus, the accumulated losses of E2 can never spell the difference between making a guaranteed profit and making no profit at all.
Note also that by making E2 positive we prevent the existence of "break-even" buying strategies in which the buyer only purchases S' securities.
Summarizing the previous argument, we may assume without loss of generality that the buyer buys all of the S' securities (for all clauses), and that for each clause the adversary sets exactly one of that clause's auxiliary variables w1, w2 or w3 to be true.
For the rest of the discussion, we assume that the players follow these constraints.
We next claim that a rational buyer will either buy all of S1, S2 or S3, or none of them.
If the buyer doesn't buy S1, then if the adversary makes w1 true and w2 and w3 false, neither S2 nor S3 will pay off, regardless of how the adversary sets X, Y and Z. Hence, there is no point in buying either S2 or S3 if one doesn't buy S1.
Applying the same argument to S2 and S3 establishes the claim.
Clearly, buying none of S1, S2 and S3 has, up to negligible E2 factors, the same price/payoff behavior as not buying S.
We next argue that, subject to the established constraints put on the players' behaviors, buying all of S1, S2 and S3 has the same price/payoff behavior (again ignoring E2 factors) as buying S, regardless of how the adversary sets X, Y and Z. First, in both cases, the cost is c.
If the adversary makes X, Y and Z true, then S pays off 1, and (assuming that exactly one of w1, w2 and w3 is true), exactly one of S1, S2 or S3 will pay off 1.
If X is false, then S doesn't pay off, and the adversary can set w1 true (and w2 and w3 false), ensuring that none of S1, S2 and S3 pays off.
The same argument holds if Y or Z are false.
6.
TRACTABLE CASES
The logical question to ask in light of these complexity results is whether further, more severe restrictions on the space of securities can enable tractable matching algorithms.
Although we have not systematically explored the possibilities, the potential for useful tractable cases certainly exists.
Suppose, for example, that bids are limited to unit quantities of securities of the following two forms:
1.
Disjunctions of positive events: (A1 V • • • V Ak).
2.
Single negative events: (¯ Ai).
Let p be the price offered for a disjunction (A1 V • • • V Ak), and qi the maximal price offered for the respective negated disjuncts.
This disjunction bid is part of a match iff p + Pi qi> k. Evaluating whether this condition is satisfied by a subset of bids is quite straightforward.
Although this example is contrived, its application is not entirely implausible.
For example, the disjunctions may correspond to insurance customers, who want an insurance contract to cover all the potential causes of their asset loss.
The atomic securities are sold by insurers, each of whom specialize in a different form of disaster cause.
7.
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
We have analyzed the computational complexity of matching for securities based on logical formulas.
Many possible avenues for future work exist, including
1.
Analyzing the agents' optimization problem: • How to choose quantities and bid/ask prices for a collection of securities to maximizes one's expected utility, both for linear and nonlinear utility functions.
9 How to choose securities; that is, deciding on what collection of boolean formulas to offer to trade, subject to constraints or penalties on the number or complexity of bids.
9 How do make the above choices in a game theoretically sound way, taking into account the choices of other traders, their reasoning about other traders, etc. .

trade in financi instrument base on logic formula