Related papers: The second-price auction solves King Solomon's dil…
In a single-parameter mechanism design problem, a provider is looking to sell a service to a group of potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ has a private value $v_i$ for receiving the service and a feasibility constraint restricts which sets of…
We study simple and approximately optimal auctions for agents with a particular form of risk-averse preferences. We show that, for symmetric agents, the optimal revenue (given a prior distribution over the agent preferences) can be…
We study a pricing problem where a seller has $k$ identical copies of a product, buyers arrive sequentially, and the seller prices the items aiming to maximize social welfare. When $k=1$, this is the so called "prophet inequality" problem…
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…
We study the problem of auction design for advertising platforms that face strategic advertisers who are bidding across platforms. Each advertiser's goal is to maximize their total value or conversions while satisfying some constraint(s)…
Second-price auctions with reserve play a critical role for modern search engine and popular online sites since the revenue of these companies often directly de- pends on the outcome of such auctions. The choice of the reserve price is the…
A principal has $m$ identical objects to allocate among a group of $n$ agents. Objects are desirable and the principal's value of assigning an object to an agent is the agent's private information. The principal can verify up to $k$ agents,…
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…
Market-based mechanisms such as auctions are being studied as an appropriate means for resource allocation in distributed and mulitagent decision problems. When agents value resources in combination rather than in isolation, they must often…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
We study problems arising in real-time auction markets, common in e-commerce and computational advertising, where bidders face the problem of calculating optimal bids. We focus upon a contract management problem where a demand aggregator is…
The Stable Roommates problem involves matching a set of agents into pairs based on the agents' strict ordinal preference lists. The matching must be stable, meaning that no two agents strictly prefer each other to their assigned partners. A…
In a multiple-object auction, every bidder tries to win as many objects as possible with a bidding algorithm. This paper studies position-randomized auctions, which form a special class of multiple-object auctions where a bidding algorithm…
In settings where full incentive-compatibility is not available, such as core-constraint combinatorial auctions and budget-balanced combinatorial exchanges, we may wish to design mechanisms that are as incentive-compatible as possible. This…
Sponsored search positions are typically allocated through real-time auctions, where the outcomes depend on advertisers' quality-adjusted bids - the product of their bids and quality scores. Although quality scoring helps promote ads with…
We consider budget feasible mechanisms for procurement auctions with additive valuation functions. For the divisible case, where agents can be allocated fractionally, there exists an optimal mechanism with approximation guarantee $e/(e-1)$…
We present a general framework for proving polynomial sample complexity bounds for the problem of learning from samples the best auction in a class of "simple" auctions. Our framework captures all of the most prominent examples of "simple"…
We describe human-subject laboratory experiments on probabilistic auctions based on previously proposed auction protocols involving the simulated manipulation and communication of quantum states. These auctions are probabilistic in…
Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…
This paper studies a simplicity notion in a mechanism design setting in which agents do not necessarily share a common prior. I develop a model in which agents participate in a prior-free game of (coarse) information acquisition followed by…