Related papers: Optimal Deterministic Auctions with Correlated Pri…
Finding optimal solutions for multi-unit combinatorial auctions is a hard problem and finding approximations to the optimal solution is also hard. We investigate the use of Branch-and-Bound techniques: they require both a way to bound from…
Auctions are becoming an increasingly popular method for transacting business, especially over the Internet. This article presents a general approach to building autonomous bidding agents to bid in multiple simultaneous auctions for…
In this work we consider selling items using a sequential first price auction mechanism. We generalize the assumption of conservative bidding to extensive form games (henceforth optimistic conservative bidding), and show that for both…
We consider the revenue maximization problem with sharp multi-demand, in which $m$ indivisible items have to be sold to $n$ potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ is interested in getting exactly $d_i$ items, and each item $j$ gives a benefit…
Consider a seller that intends to auction some item. The seller can invest money and effort in advertising in different market segments in order to recruit $n$ bidders to the auction. Alternatively, the seller can have a much cheaper and…
We improve the best known competitive ratio (from 1/4 to 1/2), for the online multi-unit allocation problem, where the objective is to maximize the single-price revenue. Moreover, the competitive ratio of our algorithm tends to 1, as the…
We study the design and approximation of optimal crowdsourcing contests. Crowdsourcing contests can be modeled as all-pay auctions because entrants must exert effort up-front to enter. Unlike all-pay auctions where a usual design objective…
We analyze the problem of how to optimally bid for ad spaces in online ad auctions. For this we consider the general case of multiple ad campaigns with overlapping targeting criteria. In our analysis we first characterize the structure of…
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 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…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
The existing literature on optimal auctions focuses on optimizing the expected revenue of the seller, and is appropriate for risk-neutral sellers. In this paper, we identify good mechanisms for risk-averse sellers. As is standard in the…
We cast the problem of combinatorial auction design in a Bayesian framework in order to incorporate prior information into the auction process and minimize the number of rounds to convergence. We first develop a generative model of agent…
We study a real-time bidding problem resulting from a set of contractual obligations stipulating that a firm win a specified number of heterogeneous impressions or ad placements over a defined duration in a real-time auction. The contracts…
In this paper, we consider the problem of optimizing the revenue a web publisher gets through real-time bidding (i.e. from ads sold in real-time auctions) and direct (i.e. from ads sold through contracts agreed in advance). We consider a…
In a sequential auction with multiple bidding agents, it is highly challenging to determine the ordering of the items to sell in order to maximize the revenue due to the fact that the autonomy and private information of the agents heavily…
We design a fixed-price auction mechanism for a seller to sell multiple items in a tree-structured market. The buyers have independently drawn valuation from a uniform distribution, and the seller would like to incentivize buyers to invite…
We study the problem of learning to bid when the bidder's value is dynamic, i.e., when the current value depends on past outcomes. Specifically, we consider a bidder participating in repeated second-price auctions whose value depends on the…
We address the challenging problem of dynamically pricing complementary items that are sequentially displayed to customers. An illustrative example is the online sale of flight tickets, where customers navigate through multiple web pages.…