Related papers: Sequential Posted Pricing and Multi-parameter Mech…
We consider a model of bilateral trade with private values. The value of the buyer and the cost of the seller are jointly distributed. The true joint distribution is unknown to the designer, however, the marginal distributions of the value…
The aggregation of conflicting preferences is a central problem in multiagent systems. The key difficulty is that the agents may report their preferences insincerely. Mechanism design is the art of designing the rules of the game so that…
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,…
In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We consider job scheduling settings, with multiple machines, where jobs arrive online and choose a machine selfishly so as to minimize their cost. Our objective is the classic makespan minimization objective, which corresponds to the…
We consider revenue-optimal mechanism design in the interdimensional setting, where one dimension is the 'value' of the buyer, and one is a 'type' that captures some auxiliary information. One setting is the FedEx Problem, for which FGKK…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
We develop efficient algorithms to construct utility maximizing mechanisms in the presence of risk averse players (buyers and sellers) in Bayesian settings. We model risk aversion by a concave utility function, and players play…
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…
We consider the provision of an abstract service to single-dimensional agents. Our model includes position auctions, single-minded combinatorial auctions, and constrained matching markets. When the agents' values are drawn from a…
Myerson derived a simple and elegant solution to the single-parameter revenue-maximization problem in his seminal work on optimal auction design assuming the usual model of quasi-linear utilities. In this paper, we consider a slight…
Peer prediction mechanisms are often adopted to elicit truthful contributions from crowd workers when no ground-truth verification is available. Recently, mechanisms of this type have been developed to incentivize effort exertion, in…
In budget-feasible mechanism design, a buyer wishes to procure a set of items of maximum value from self-interested players. We have a valuation function $v:2^U \to \mathbb{R}_+$, where $U$ is the set of all items, where $v(S)$ specifies…
We consider the optimal pricing problem for a model of the rich media advertisement market, as well as other related applications. In this market, there are multiple buyers (advertisers), and items (slots) that are arranged in a line such…
The design of multiple experiments is commonly undertaken via suboptimal strategies, such as batch (open-loop) design that omits feedback or greedy (myopic) design that does not account for future effects. This paper introduces new…
We consider the problem of designing an expected-revenue maximizing mechanism for allocating multiple non-perishable goods of $k$ varieties to flexible consumers over $T$ time steps. In our model, a random number of goods of each variety…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (called contract) so as to incentivize the agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. In…
We study Bayesian mechanism design problems in settings where agents have budgets. Specifically, an agent's utility for an outcome is given by his value for the outcome minus any payment he makes to the mechanism, as long as the payment is…
Finding the optimal (revenue-maximizing) mechanism to sell multiple items has been a prominent and notoriously difficult open problem. Existing work has mainly focused on deriving analytical results tailored to a particular class of…