  This paper considers a demand-side aggregation scheme specifically for large
numbers of small loads, such as households and small and medium-sized
businesses. We introduce a novel auction format, called a staggered clock-proxy
auction (SCPA), for on-line scheduling of these loads. This is a two phase
format, consisting of: a sequence of overlapping iterative ascending-price
clock auctions, one for each time-slot over a finite decision horizon, and; a
set of proxy auctions that begin at the termination of each individual clock
auction, and which determine the final price and allocation for each time-slot.
The overlapping design of the clock phases grant bidders the ability to
effectively bid on inter-temporal bundles of electricity use, thereby focusing
on the most relevant parts of the price-quantity space. Since electricity is a
divisible good, the proxy auction uses demand-schedule bids, which the
aggregator uses to compute a uniform-price partial competitive equilibrium for
each time slot. We show that, under mild assumptions on the bidders' utilities
functions, the proxy phase implements the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves outcome, which
makes straightforward bidding in the proxy phase a Bayes-Nash equilibrium.
Furthermore, we demonstrate the SCPA in a scenario comprised of household
agents with three different utility function types, and show how the mechanism
enables efficient on-line energy use scheduling.
