In mechanism design and auction theory, a profit extraction mechanism (also called profit extractor or revenue extractor) is a truthful mechanism whose goal is to win a pre-specified amount of profit, if it is possible.
Proof: Since the agents have single-parametric utility functions, truthfulness is equivalent to monotonicity.
The profit extractor is monotonic because: The main challenge in using an auction based on a profit-extractor is to choose the best value for the parameter
A variant of this mechanism partitions the agents to three groups instead of two, and attains at least 1/3.25 of the maximum profit.
[1]: 350 The profit-extraction idea can be generalized to arbitrary single-parameter utility agents.
In particular, it can be used in a double auction where several sellers sell a single unit of some item (with different costs) and several buyers want at most a single unit of that item (with different valuations).
[3] It was adapted from the cost-sharing literature to the auction setting.