Related papers: Substitute Valuations: Generation and Structure
Complements between goods - where one good takes on added value in the presence of another - have been a thorn in the side of algorithmic mechanism designers. On the one hand, complements are common in the standard motivating applications…
Gross substitutability is a central concept in Economics and is connected to important notions in Discrete Convex Analysis, Number Theory and the analysis of Greedy algorithms in Computer Science. Many different characterizations are known…
We introduce a novel characterization of all Walrasian price vectors in terms of forbidden over- and under demanded sets for monotone gross substitute combinatorial auctions. For ascending and descending auctions we suggest a universal…
This paper develops algorithms to solve strong-substitutes product-mix auctions. That is, it finds competitive equilibrium prices and quantities for agents who use this auction's bidding language to truthfully express their…
This paper addresses the computational challenges of learning strong substitutes demand when given access to a demand (or valuation) oracle. Strong substitutes demand generalises the well-studied gross substitutes demand to a multi-unit…
Combinatorial auctions are formulated as frustrated lattice gases on sparse random graphs, allowing the determination of the optimal revenue by methods of statistical physics. Transitions between computationally easy and hard regimes are…
In this paper we consider multidimensional mechanism design problem for selling discrete substitutable items to a group of buyers. Previous work on this problem mostly focus on stochastic description of valuations used by the seller.…
We propose a combinatorial ascending auction that is "approximately" optimal, requiring minimal rationality to achieve this level of optimality, and is robust to strategic and distributional uncertainties. Specifically, the auction is…
In the combinatorial action model of contract design, a principal delegates a complex project to an agent, incentivizing a subset of actions from a ground set of $n$ actions, via a linear contract. Computing the optimal contract is a…
We study the combinatorial contracting problem of D\"utting et al. [FOCS '21], in which a principal seeks to incentivize an agent to take a set of costly actions. In their model, there is a binary outcome (the agent can succeed or fail),…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
This paper proposes an original exchange property of valuations.This property is shown to be equivalent to a property described by Dress and Terhalle in the context of discrete optimization and matroids and shown there to characterize the…
We cast the problem of combinatorial auction design in a Bayesian framework in order to incorporate prior information into the auction process and minimize the number of rounds to convergence. We first develop a generative model of agent…
We study a new model of complementary valuations, which we call "proportional complementarities." In contrast to common models, such as hypergraphic valuations, in our model, we do not assume that the extra value derived from owning a set…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
In most of microeconomic theory, consumers are assumed to exhibit decreasing marginal utilities. This paper considers combinatorial auctions among such submodular buyers. The valuations of such buyers are placed within a hierarchy of…
The existence of incentive-compatible computationally-efficient protocols for combinatorial auctions with decent approximation ratios is the paradigmatic problem in computational mechanism design. It is believed that in many cases good…
In this paper, we study the problem of maximizing social welfare in combinatorial markets through pricing schemes. We consider the existence of prices that are capable to achieve optimal social welfare without a central tie-breaking…
The matroid-based valuation conjecture of Ostrovsky and Paes Leme states that all gross substitutes valuations on $n$ items can be produced from merging and endowments of weighted ranks of matroids defined on at most $m(n)$ items. We show…
The optimal pricing problem is a fundamental problem that arises in combinatorial auctions. Suppose that there is one seller who has indivisible items and multiple buyers who want to purchase a combination of the items. The seller wants to…