Related papers: The second-price auction solves King Solomon's dil…
In this paper we study the problem of allocating a scarce resource among several players (or agents). A central decision maker wants to maximize the total utility of all agents. However, such a solution may be unfair for one or more agents…
A speculator can take advantage of a procurement auction by acquiring items for sale before the auction. The accumulated market power can then be exercised in the auction and may lead to a large enough gain to cover the acquisition costs. I…
We divide efficiently a pile of indivisible goods in common property, using cash transfers to ensure fairness among agents with utility linear in money. We compare three cognitively feasible and privacy preserving division rules in terms of…
This paper describes a study of agent bidding strategies, assuming combinatorial valuations for complementary and substitutable goods, in three auction environments: sequential auctions, simultaneous auctions, and the Trading Agent…
We study the role of costly information in non-cooperative two-player games when an extrinsic third party information broker is introduced asymmetrically, allowing one player to obtain information about the other player's action. This…
We study the problem of a buyer (aka auctioneer) who gains stochastic rewards by procuring multiple units of a service or item from a pool of heterogeneous strategic agents. The reward obtained for a single unit from an allocated agent…
In online advertising, search engines sell ad placements for keywords continuously through auctions. This problem can be seen as an infinitely repeated game since the auction is executed whenever a user performs a query with the keyword. As…
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…
We prove that the classic problem of finding a competitive equilibrium in an exchange economy with indivisible goods, money, and unit-demand agents is PPAD-complete. In this "housing market", agents have preferences over the house and…
We consider Stackelberg pricing games, which are also known as bilevel pricing problems, or combinatorial price-setting problems. This family of problems consists of games between two players: the leader and the follower. There is a market…
Noncooperative multi-agent systems often face coordination challenges due to conflicting preferences among agents. In particular, when agents act in their own self-interest, they may prefer different choices among multiple feasible…
Learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions is a fundamental problem at the interface of game theory and machine learning, which has seen a recent surge in interest due to the transition of display advertising to first-price auctions.…
We consider a private variant of the classical allocation problem: given k goods and n agents with individual, private valuation functions over bundles of goods, how can we partition the goods amongst the agents to maximize social welfare?…
We study risk-free bidding strategies in combinatorial auctions with incomplete information. Specifically, what is the maximum profit that a complement-free (subadditive) bidder can guarantee in a multi-item combinatorial auction? Suppose…
We consider budget constrained combinatorial auctions where bidder $i$ has a private value $v_i$, a budget $b_i$, and is interested in all the items in $S_i$. The value to agent $i$ of a set of items $R$ is $|R \cap S_i| \cdot v_i$. Such…
We study the question of setting and testing reserve prices in single item auctions when the bidders are not identical. At a high level, there are two generalizations of the standard second price auction: in the lazy version we first…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…
In non-truthful auctions, agents' utility for a strategy depends on the strategies of the opponents and also the prior distribution over their private types; the set of Bayes Nash equilibria generally has an intricate dependence on the…
We study how a budget-constrained bidder should learn to adaptively bid in repeated first-price auctions to maximize her cumulative payoff. This problem arose due to an industry-wide shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions…
We focus on online second price auctions, where bids are made sequentially, and the winning bidder pays the maximum of the second-highest bid and a seller specified starting price. For many such auctions, the seller does not see all the…