Related papers: Pricing Randomized Allocations
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
Many algorithms that are originally designed without explicitly considering incentive properties are later combined with simple pricing rules and used as mechanisms. The resulting mechanisms are often natural and simple to understand. But…
Mechanisms such as auctions and pricing schemes are utilized to design strategic (noncooperative) games for networked systems. Although the participating players are selfish, these mechanisms ensure that the game outcome is optimal with…
We consider a mechanism design setting with a single item and a single buyer who is uncertain about the value of the item. Both the buyer and the seller have a common model for the buyer's value, but the buyer discovers her true value only…
In many realistic problems of allocating resources, economy efficiency must be taken into consideration together with social equality, and price rigidities are often made according to some economic and social needs. We study the…
Lotteries are a prevalent form of gambling between a seller and buyers. Designing a lottery requires a model of how buyers make decisions when confronted with uncertain outcomes. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is a descriptive model that…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…
In a single-parameter mechanism design problem, a provider is looking to sell a service to a group of potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ has a private value $v_i$ for receiving the service and a feasibility constraint restricts which sets of…
We study a type of reverse (procurement) auction problems in the presence of budget constraints. The general algorithmic problem is to purchase a set of resources, which come at a cost, so as not to exceed a given budget and at the same…
Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…
Algorithms for determining quality/cost/price tradeoffs in saturated markets are considered. A product is modeled by $d$ real-valued qualities whose sum determines the unit cost of producing the product. This leads to the following…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a…
We investigate the power of randomness in the context of a fundamental Bayesian optimal mechanism design problem--a single seller aims to maximize expected revenue by allocating multiple kinds of resources to "unit-demand" agents with…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
We provide algorithms that learn simple auctions whose revenue is approximately optimal in multi-item multi-bidder settings, for a wide range of valuations including unit-demand, additive, constrained additive, XOS, and subadditive. We…
We present a polynomial-time algorithm that, given samples from the unknown valuation distribution of each bidder, learns an auction that approximately maximizes the auctioneer's revenue in a variety of single-parameter auction environments…
One of the most celebrated results in mechanism design is Myerson's characterization of the revenue optimal auction for selling a single item. However, this result relies heavily on the assumption that buyers are indifferent to risk. In…