Scale-robust Auctions
Computer Science and Game Theory
2025-10-27 v1 Theoretical Economics
Abstract
We study auctions that are robust at any scale, i.e., they can be applied to sell both expensive and cheap items and achieve the best multiplicative approximations of the optimal revenue in the worst case. We show that the optimal mechanism is scale invariant, which randomizes between selling at the second-price and a 2.45 multiple of the second-price.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2510.21231,
title = {Scale-robust Auctions},
author = {Jason Hartline and Aleck Johnsen and Yingkai Li},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.21231},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Part of the results from this work has appeared in FOCS'20 under the title "Benchmark Design and Prior-independent Optimization"