Related papers: Efficiency Loss in Revenue Optimal Auctions
Consider the problem of allocating goods to buyers through an auction. An auction is efficient if the resulting allocation maximizes total welfare, conditional on the information available. If buyers have private values, the…
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…
We study the bilateral trade problem where a seller owns a single indivisible item, and a potential buyer seeks to purchase it. Previous mechanisms for this problem only considered the case where the values of the buyer and the seller are…
We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…
We compare the expected efficiency of revenue maximizing (or {\em optimal}) mechanisms with that of efficiency maximizing ones. We show that the efficiency of the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling a single item with k + log_{e/(e-1)}…
Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic…
We study the optimal auction design problem when bidders' preferences follow the maxmin expected utility model. We suppose that each bidder's set of priors consists of beliefs close to the seller's belief, where "closeness" is defined by a…
We consider the optimization problem of a multi-resource, multi-unit VCG auction that produces an optimal, i.e., non-approximated, social welfare. We present an algorithm that solves this optimization problem with pseudo-polynomial…
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 initiate the study of the social welfare loss caused by corrupt auctioneers, both in single-item and multi-unit auctions. In our model, the auctioneer may collude with the winning bidders by letting them lower their bids in exchange for…
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 \emph{combinatorial procurement auctions}, where a buyer with a valuation function $v$ and budget $B$ wishes to buy a set of items. Each item $i$ has a cost $c_i$ and the buyer is interested in a set $S$ that maximizes $v(S)$…
Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bids reach the seller directly. We study how this picture changes when a revenue-maximizing intermediary controls access to the seller's auction. Motivated by blockchain auctions, online…
We study the revenue comparison problem of auctions when the seller has a maxmin expected utility preference. The seller holds a set of priors around some reference belief, interpreted as an approximating model of the true probability law…
We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be…
Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…
We resolve the complexity of revenue-optimal deterministic auctions in the unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian setting, i.e., the optimal item pricing problem, when the buyer's values for the items are independent. We show that the problem of…
The enhanced competition paradigm is an attempt at bridging the gap between simple and optimal auctions. In this line of work, given an auction setting with $m$ items and $n$ bidders, the goal is to find the smallest $n' \geq n$ such that…
We study a participatory budgeting problem of aggregating the preferences of agents and dividing a budget over the projects. A budget division solution is a probability distribution over the projects. The main purpose of our study concerns…
The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…