A combinatorial auction for cost reduction in city home health care

We propose a combinatorial auction for the allocation of home visits to independent health care practitioners in the setting of city home health care. Given the practitioners´ different skill sets, time constraints and costs incurred in order to provide the services, the auction allocate home visits to practitioners such that all planned visits are covered with qualified practitioners and, at the same time, the overall service costs are minimized. We assume a game theoretic setting where practitioners are modeled as self-interested agents. We present a combinatorial auction as the allocation mechanism. We show that the auction is incentive compatible and the individual rational.