Related papers: Mechanism Design and Risk Aversion
Generating good revenue is one of the most important problems in Bayesian auction design, and many (approximately) optimal dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) Bayesian mechanisms have been constructed for various auction settings.…
One of the most celebrated results in mechanism design is Myerson's characterization of the revenue optimal auction for selling a single item. However, this result relies heavily on the assumption that buyers are indifferent to risk. In…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
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 consider a model of bilateral trade with private values. The value of the buyer and the cost of the seller are jointly distributed. The true joint distribution is unknown to the designer, however, the marginal distributions of the value…
We efficiently solve the optimal multi-dimensional mechanism design problem for independent bidders with arbitrary demand constraints when either the number of bidders is a constant or the number of items is a constant. In the first…
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…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
A Bayesian design is given by maximising an expected utility over a design space. The utility is chosen to represent the aim of the experiment and its expectation is taken with respect to all unknowns: responses, parameters and/or models.…
We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…
A seller wants to sell an item to $n$ buyers. Buyer valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution unknown to the seller; the seller only knows that the support is included in $[a, b]$. To be robust, the seller chooses a DSIC mechanism…
We study a classical Bayesian mechanism design problem where a seller is selling multiple items to multiple buyers. We consider the case where the seller has costs to produce the items, and these costs are private information to the seller.…
We study the design of Bayesian incentive compatible mechanisms in single parameter domains, for the objective of optimizing social efficiency as measured by social cost. In the problems we consider, a group of participants compete to…
We consider the problem of designing an expected-revenue maximizing mechanism for allocating multiple non-perishable goods of $k$ varieties to flexible consumers over $T$ time steps. In our model, a random number of goods of each variety…
Assortment optimization concerns the problem of selling items with fixed prices to a buyer who will purchase at most one. Typically, retailers select a subset of items, corresponding to an "assortment" of brands to carry, and make each…
Mechanism design for one-sided markets has been investigated for several decades in economics and in computer science. More recently, there has been an increased attention on mechanisms for two-sided markets, in which buyers and sellers act…
We study Bayesian mechanism design problems in settings where agents have budgets. Specifically, an agent's utility for an outcome is given by his value for the outcome minus any payment he makes to the mechanism, as long as the payment is…
Optimal design of experiments for Bayesian inverse problems has recently gained wide popularity and attracted much attention, especially in the computational science and Bayesian inversion communities. An optimal design maximizes a…
We study how to maximize the broker's (expected) profit in a two-sided market, where she buys items from a set of sellers and resells them to a set of buyers. Each seller has a single item to sell and holds a private value on her item, and…
We consider the classical mathematical economics problem of {\em Bayesian optimal mechanism design} where a principal aims to optimize expected revenue when allocating resources to self-interested agents with preferences drawn from a known…