Related papers: Sequential Posted Pricing and Multi-parameter Mech…

We study a novel class of mechanism design problems in which the outcomes are constrained by the payments. This basic class of mechanism design problems captures many common economic situations, and yet it has not been studied, to our…

We are interested in mechanisms that maximize social welfare. In [1] this problem was studied for multi-unit auctions with unit demand bidders and for the public project problem, and in each case social welfare undominated mechanisms in the…

In the online (time-series) search problem, a player is presented with a sequence of prices which are revealed in an online manner. In the standard definition of the problem, for each revealed price, the player must decide irrevocably…

Sequential posted pricing auctions are popular because of their simplicity in practice and their tractability in theory. A usual assumption in their study is that the Bayesian prior distributions of the buyers are known to the seller, while…

We study a model of auction design where a seller is selling a set of objects to a set of agents who can be assigned no more than one object. Each agent's preference over (object, payment) pair need not be quasilinear. If the domain…

We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…

Designing an incentive compatible auction that maximizes expected revenue is an intricate task. The single-item case was resolved in a seminal piece of work by Myerson in 1981, but more than 40 years later a full analytical understanding of…

We study the two-agent single-item bilateral trade. Ideally, the trade should happen whenever the buyer's value for the item exceeds the seller's cost. However, the classical result of Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that no mechanism can…

In this work, we study sequential contracts under matroid constraints. In the sequential setting, an agent can take actions one by one. After each action, the agent observes the stochastic value of the action and then decides which action…

Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…

We study a classic Bayesian mechanism design setting of monopoly problem for an additive buyer in the presence of budgets. In this setting a monopolist seller with $m$ heterogeneous items faces a single buyer and seeks to maximize her…

We consider the problem of maximizing revenue for a monopolist offering multiple items to multiple heterogeneous buyers. We develop a simple mechanism that obtains a constant factor approximation under the assumption that the buyers' values…

In this paper, we develop a new method for finding an optimal biddingstrategy in sequential auctions, using a dynamic programming technique. Theexisting method assumes that the utility of a user is represented in anadditive form. Thus, the…

Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…

We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…

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 investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…

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…

In this paper, we consider the classic stochastic (dynamic) knapsack problem, a fundamental mathematical model in revenue management, with general time-varying random demand. Our main goal is to study the optimal policies, which can be…

Market-based mechanisms such as auctions are being studied as an appropriate means for resource allocation in distributed and mulitagent decision problems. When agents value resources in combination rather than in isolation, they must often…