Related papers: Robust Mechanisms for Risk-Averse Sellers
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…
The question of pricing and hedging a given contingent claim has a unique solution in a complete market framework. When some incompleteness is introduced, the problem becomes however more difficult. Several approaches have been adopted in…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
In Bayesian single-item auctions, a monotone bidding strategy--one that prescribes a higher bid for a higher value type--can be equivalently represented as a partition of the quantile space into consecutive intervals corresponding to…
Generating good revenue is one of the most important problems in Bayesian auction design, and many (approximately) optimal dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) Bayesian mechanisms have been constructed for various auction settings.…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
When selling many goods with independent valuations, we develop a distributionally robust framework, consisting of a two-player game between seller and nature. The seller has only limited knowledge about the value distribution. The seller…
A sequence of recent studies show that even in the simple setting of a single seller and a single buyer with additive, independent valuations over $m$ items, the revenue-maximizing mechanism is prohibitively complex. This problem has been…
A buyer wishes to purchase a durable good from a seller who in each period chooses a mechanism under limited commitment. The buyer's valuation is binary and fully persistent. We show that posted prices implement all equilibrium outcomes of…
We study the problem of characterizing revenue optimal auctions for single-minded buyers. Each buyer is interested only in a specific bundle of items and has a value for the same. Both his bundle and its value are his private information.…
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…
Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…
Existing auction mechanisms are vulnerable to bidder collusion, which substantially degrades revenue and non-colluder welfare. To design truthful mechanisms resilient to collusion, we introduce a novel approach that leverages a machine…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…
We study robust notions of good-deal hedging and valuation under combined uncertainty about the drifts and volatilities of asset prices. Good-deal bounds are determined by a subset of risk-neutral pricing measures such that not only…
Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…
We study a mechanism design problem where a seller aims to allocate a good to multiple bidders, each with a private value. The seller supports or favors a specific group, referred to as the minority group. Specifically, the seller requires…
We introduce the notion of rigidity in auction design and use it to analyze some fundamental aspects of mechanism design. We focus on single-item auctions where the values of the bidders are drawn from some (possibly correlated)…
We continue the study of the performance for fixed-price mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem, and improve approximation ratios of welfare-optimal mechanisms in several settings. Specifically, in the case where only the buyer…