Related papers: Testing affiliation in private-values models of fi…

We consider nonparametric identification of independent private value first-price auction models, in which the analyst only observes winning bids. Our benchmark model assumes an exogenous number of bidders $N$. We show that, if the bidders…

Since economic mechanisms are often applied to very different instances of the same problem, it is desirable to identify mechanisms that work well in a wide range of circumstances. We pursue this goal for a position auction setting and…

In this paper, we study how a budget-constrained bidder should learn to bid adaptively in repeated first-price auctions to maximize cumulative payoff. This problem arises from the recent industry-wide shift from second-price auctions to…

We propose a semiparametric method to estimate the density of private values in first-price auctions. Specifically, we model private values through a set of conditional moment restrictions and use a two-step procedure. In the first step we…

We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this class,…

We study a market for private data in which a data analyst publicly releases a statistic over a database of private information. Individuals that own the data incur a cost for their loss of privacy proportional to the differential privacy…

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…

Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…

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…

Traditional economic models typically treat private information, or signals, as generated from some underlying state. Recent work has explicated alternative models, where signals correspond to interpretations of available information. We…

Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to possess…

In a classical model of the first-price sealed-bid auction with independent private values, we develop nonparametric estimators for several policy-relevant targets, such as the bidder's surplus and auctioneer's revenue under counterfactual…

We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue,…

We study multi-unit auctions in which bidders have limited knowledge of opponent strategies and values. We characterize optimal prior-free bids; these bids minimize the maximal loss in expected utility resulting from uncertainty surrounding…

We consider auctions in which greedy algorithms, paired with first-price or critical-price payment rules, are used to resolve multi-parameter combinatorial allocation problems. We study the price of anarchy for social welfare in such…

Optimal auction design is a fundamental problem in algorithmic game theory. This problem is notoriously difficult already in very simple settings. Recent work in differentiable economics showed that neural networks can efficiently learn…

Bidding in simultaneous auctions is challenging because an agent's value for a good in one auction may depend on the uncertain outcome of other auctions: the so-called exposure problem. Given the gap in understanding of general simultaneous…

While auction theory views bids and valuations as continuous variables, real-world auctions are necessarily discrete. In this paper, we use a combination of analytical and computational methods to investigate whether incorporating…

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…

In the standard single-dimensional model of position auctions, bidders agree on the relative values of the positions and each of them submits a single bid that is interpreted in terms of these values. Motivated by current practice in…