Related papers: Resource allocation with costly participation
We study revenue optimization pricing algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation. We show that, in the case when both the seller and the buyer…
Sellers often prescreen potential bidders, restricting participation to a select group of capable participants. Recent advances in machine learning and generative AI make this strategy increasingly viable by enabling the cost-effective…
We study the inefficiency of mixed equilibria, expressed as the price of anarchy, of all-pay auctions in three different environments: combinatorial, multi-unit and single-item auctions. First, we consider item-bidding combinatorial…
A line of recent work provides welfare guarantees of simple combinatorial auction formats, such as selling m items via simultaneous second price auctions (SiSPAs) (Christodoulou et al. 2008, Bhawalkar and Roughgarden 2011, Feldman et al.…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…
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,…
Simultaneous item auctions are simple procedures for allocating items to bidders with potentially complex preferences over different item sets. In a simultaneous auction, every bidder submits bids on all items simultaneously. The allocation…
Recent empirical work demonstrates that online advertisement can exhibit bias in the delivery of ads across users even when all advertisers bid in a non-discriminatory manner. We study the design of ad auctions that, given fair bids, are…
In quasi-proportional auctions, each bidder receives a fraction of the allocation equal to the weight of their bid divided by the sum of weights of all bids, where each bid's weight is determined by a weight function. We study the…
We study the optimal auction design problem when bidders' preferences follow the maxmin expected utility model. We suppose that each bidder's set of priors consists of beliefs close to the seller's belief, where "closeness" is defined by a…
We introduce a new numerical framework to learn optimal bidding strategies in repeated auctions when the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. Crucially, we do not assume that the bidders know what optimization mechanism is used…
As commerce shifts to digital marketplaces, platforms increasingly monetize traffic through Sponsored Shopping auctions. Unlike classic ``Sponsored Search", where an advertiser typically bids for a single link, these settings involve…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
We study a decentralized matching market in which firms sequentially make offers to potential workers. For each offer, the worker can choose "accept" or "reject," but the decision is irrevocable. The acceptance of an offer guarantees her…
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…
We study the equilibria of uniform price auctions where many asymmetric bidders have flat demands up to their respective quantity constraints. We present an iterative procedure that systematically finds an equilibrium outcome as well as an…
We study social welfare of learning outcomes in mechanisms with admission. In our repeated game there are $n$ bidders and $m$ mechanisms, and in each round each mechanism is available for each bidder only with a certain probability. Our…
In a seminal paper, McAfee (1992) presented the first dominant strategy truthful mechanism for double auction. His mechanism attains nearly optimal gain-from-trade when the market is sufficiently large. However, his mechanism may leave…
I construct a novel random double auction as a robust bilateral trading mechanism for a profit-maximizing intermediary who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. It works as follows. The intermediary publicly commits to charging a…