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

We consider a multi-dimensional screening problem of selling a product with multiple quality levels and design virtual value functions to derive conditions that imply optimality of only selling highest quality. A challenge of designing…

We study the design of optimal allocation mechanisms in an environment where agents and goods arrive stochastically. Agents have private types that determine the principal payoff. Either agents or goods can be held in a queue at a flow cost…

We consider the problem of posting prices for unit-demand buyers if all $n$ buyers have identically distributed valuations drawn from a distribution with monotone hazard rate. We show that even with multiple items asymptotically optimal…

Employing probabilistic techniques we compute best possible upper and lower bounds on the price of an option on one or two assets with continuous piecewise linear payoff function based on prices of simple call options of possibly distinct…

We study the problem when a firm sets prices for products based on the transaction data, i.e., which product past customers chose from an assortment and what were the historical prices that they observed. Our approach does not impose a…

Budget-feasible procurement has been a major paradigm in mechanism design since its introduction by Singer (2010). An auctioneer (buyer) with a strict budget constraint is interested in buying goods or services from a group of strategic…

We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to…

The Bayesian online selection problem aims to design a pricing scheme for a sequence of arriving buyers that maximizes the expected social welfare (or revenue) subject to different structural constraints. Inspired by applications with a…

We study the optimal mechanism design problem faced by a market intermediary who makes revenue by connecting buyers and sellers. We first show that the optimal intermediation protocol has substantial structure: it is the solution to an…

We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…

Budget feasible mechanism design studies procurement combinatorial auctions where the sellers have private costs to produce items, and the buyer(auctioneer) aims to maximize a social valuation function on subsets of items, under the budget…

A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…

This paper considers prior-independent mechanism design, namely identifying a single mechanism that has near optimal performance on every prior distribution. We show that mechanisms with truthtelling equilibria, a.k.a., revelation…

Preferential Bayesian optimization allows optimization of objectives that are either expensive or difficult to measure directly, by relying on a minimal number of comparative evaluations done by a human expert. Generating candidate…

We consider the principal-agent problem with heterogeneous agents. Previous works assume that the principal signs independent incentive contracts with every agent to make them invest more efforts on the tasks. However, in many…

This paper derives polynomial-time approximation schemes for several NP-hard stochastic optimization problems from the algorithmic mechanism design and operations research literatures. The problems we consider involve a principal or seller…

After experimentation with other designs, the major search engines converged on the weighted, generalized second-price auction (wGSP) for selling keyword advertisements. Notably, this convergence occurred before position auctions were well…

The problem of sequentially maximizing the expectation of a function seeks to maximize the expected value of a function of interest without having direct control on its features. Instead, the distribution of such features depends on a given…

We study a pricing problem where a seller has $k$ identical copies of a product, buyers arrive sequentially, and the seller prices the items aiming to maximize social welfare. When $k=1$, this is the so called "prophet inequality" problem…

We show that in the single-parameter mechanism design environment, the only non-wasteful, symmetric, incentive compatible and Sybil-proof direct mechanism is a second price auction with symmetric tie-breaking. Thus, if there is private…