Related papers: Robust Mechanisms for Risk-Averse Sellers
Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…
A major achievement of mechanism design theory is a general method for the construction of truthful mechanisms called VCG (Vickrey, Clarke, Groves). When applying this method to complex problems such as combinatorial auctions, a difficulty…
We study auctions with severe bounds on the communication allowed: each bidder may only transmit t bits of information to the auctioneer. We consider both welfare- and profit-maximizing auctions under this communication restriction. For…
Diffusion auction is an emerging business model where a seller aims to incentivise buyers in a social network to diffuse the auction information thereby attracting potential buyers. We focus on designing mechanisms for multi-unit diffusion…
In this paper, we study efficiency in truthful auctions via a social network, where a seller can only spread the information of an auction to the buyers through the buyers' network. In single-item auctions, we show that no mechanism is…
We study robust versions of pricing problems where customers choose products according to a generalized extreme value (GEV) choice model, and the choice parameters are not known exactly but lie in an uncertainty set. We show that, when the…
In this work, we study spectrum auction problem where each request from secondary users has spatial, temporal, and spectral features. With the requests of secondary users and the reserve price of the primary user, our goal is to design…
This paper studies mechanism design for revenue maximization in a distribution-reporting setting, where the auctioneer does not know the buyers' true value distributions. Instead, each buyer reports and commits to a bid distribution in the…
Multi-unit auctions are a paradigmatic model, where a seller brings multiple units of a good, while several buyers bring monetary endowments. It is well known that Walrasian equilibria do not always exist in this model, however compelling…
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 provide a new, much simplified and straightforward proof to a result of Pavlov [2011] regarding the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling two goods with uniformly i.i.d. valuations over intervals $[c,c+1]$, to an additive buyer. This…
We study the problem of selling $n$ items to a single buyer with an additive valuation function. We consider the valuation of the items to be correlated, i.e., desirabilities of the buyer for the items are not drawn independently. Ideally,…
We study the bidding problem in repeated uniform price multi-unit auctions from the perspective of a value-maximizing buyer. The buyer aims to maximize their cumulative value over $T$ rounds while adhering to per-round return-on-investment…
We study the classic single-item auction setting of Myerson, but under the assumption that the buyers' values for the item are distributed over finite supports. Using strong LP duality and polyhedral theory, we rederive various key results…
Consider Myerson's optimal auction with respect to an inaccurate prior, e.g., estimated from data, which is an underestimation of the true value distribution. Can the auctioneer expect getting at least the optimal revenue w.r.t. the…
With the increasing use of auctions in online advertising, there has been a large effort to study seller revenue maximization, following Myerson's seminal work, both theoretically and practically. We take the point of view of the buyer in…
Auction is the common paradigm for resource allocation which is a fundamental problem in human society. Existing research indicates that the two primary objectives, the seller's revenue and the allocation efficiency, are generally…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
In this paper we derive robust super- and subhedging dualities for contingent claims that can depend on several underlying assets. In addition to strict super- and subhedging, we also consider relaxed versions which, instead of eliminating…
The ad-trading desks of media-buying agencies are increasingly relying on complex algorithms for purchasing advertising inventory. In particular, Real-Time Bidding (RTB) algorithms respond to many auctions -- usually Vickrey auctions --…