Related papers: Budget Feasible Mechanisms
We consider the problem of maximizing a monotone nondecreasing set function under multiple constraints, where the constraints are also characterized by monotone nondecreasing set functions. We propose two greedy algorithms to solve the…
Auctions are important mechanisms extensively implemented in various markets, e.g., search engines' keyword auctions, antique auctions, etc. Finding an optimal auction mechanism is extremely difficult due to the constraints of imperfect…
Digital advertising constitutes one of the main revenue sources for online platforms. In recent years, some advertisers tend to adopt auto-bidding tools to facilitate advertising performance optimization, making the classical \emph{utility…
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…
The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…
The focus of classic mechanism design has been on truthful direct-revelation mechanisms. In the context of combinatorial auctions the truthful direct-revelation mechanism that maximizes social welfare is the VCG mechanism. For many…
An auction house cannot generally provide the optimal auction technology to every client. Instead it provides one or several auction technologies, and clients select the most appropriate one. For example, eBay provides ascending auctions…
With the growth of networks, promoting products through social networks has become an important problem. For auctions in social networks, items are needed to be sold to agents in a network, where each agent can bid and also diffuse the sale…
We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…
We study the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
In machine learning and big data, the optimization objectives based on set-cover, entropy, diversity, influence, feature selection, etc. are commonly modeled as submodular functions. Submodular (function) maximization is generally NP-hard,…
For Bayesian combinatorial auctions, we present a general framework for approximately reducing the mechanism design problem for multiple buyers to single buyer sub-problems. Our framework can be applied to any setting which roughly…
We study a class of manipulations in combinatorial auctions where bidders fundamentally misrepresent what goods they are interested in. Prior work has largely assumed that bidders only submit bids on their bundles of interest, which we call…
In many applications, ads are displayed together with the prices, so as to provide a direct comparison among similar products or services. The price-displaying feature not only influences the consumers' decisions, but also affects the…
An exciting application of crowdsourcing is to use social networks in complex task execution. In this paper, we address the problem of a planner who needs to incentivize agents within a network in order to seek their help in executing an…
In this paper, we consider the problem of designing incentive compatible auctions for multiple (homogeneous) units of a good, when bidders have private valuations and private budget constraints. When only the valuations are private and the…
We study a participatory budgeting problem, where a set of strategic agents wish to split a divisible budget among different projects, by aggregating their proposals on a single division. Unfortunately, the straight-forward rule that…
Situations where a group of agents come together to jointly buy a resource that they individually cannot afford to buy are commonly observed in markets. For example in the US market for radio spectrum, a recent proposal invited small firms…
Optimization of complex functions, such as the output of computer simulators, is a difficult task that has received much attention in the literature. A less studied problem is that of optimization under unknown constraints, i.e., when the…