Related papers: Robust Mechanisms for Risk-Averse Sellers
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…
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 study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
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…
In practice, auction data are often endogenously censored and anonymous, revealing only limited outcome statistics rather than full bid profiles. We study robust auction design when the seller observes only aggregated, anonymous order…
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…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
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 study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…
This paper studies risk in a stochastic auction which facilitates the integration of renewable generation in electricity markets. We model market participants who are risk averse and reflect their risk aversion through coherent risk…
We study auctions that are robust at any scale, i.e., they can be applied to sell both expensive and cheap items and achieve the best multiplicative approximations of the optimal revenue in the worst case. We show that the optimal mechanism…
A seller wants to sell an item to $n$ buyers. Buyer valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution unknown to the seller; the seller only knows that the support is included in $[a, b]$. To be robust, the seller chooses a DSIC mechanism…
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…
We study revenue optimization pricing algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation. We show that, in the case when both the seller and the buyer…
We construct prior-free auctions with constant-factor approximation guarantees with ordered bidders, in both unlimited and limited supply settings. We compare the expected revenue of our auctions on a bid vector to the monotone price…
We study a robust selling problem where a seller attempts to sell one item to a buyer but is uncertain about the buyer's valuation distribution. Existing literature shows that robust screening provides a stronger theoretical guarantee than…
We study robust mechanisms to sell a common-value good. We assume that the mechanism designer knows the prior distribution of the buyers' common value but is unsure of the buyers' information structure about the common value. We use linear…
In classic auction theory, reserve prices are known to be effective for improving revenue for the auctioneer against quasi-linear utility maximizing bidders. The introduction of reserve prices, however, usually do not help improve total…
I construct a novel random double auction as a robust bilateral trading mechanism for a profit-maximizing intermediary who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. It works as follows. The intermediary publicly commits to charging a…