Related papers: Resource allocation with costly participation
A prevalent assumption in auction theory is that the auctioneer has full control over the market and that the allocation she dictates is final. In practice, however, agents might be able to resell acquired items in an aftermarket. A…
A large fraction of online advertisement is sold via repeated second price auctions. In these auctions, the reserve price is the main tool for the auctioneer to boost revenues. In this work, we investigate the following question: Can…
We develop efficient algorithms to construct utility maximizing mechanisms in the presence of risk averse players (buyers and sellers) in Bayesian settings. We model risk aversion by a concave utility function, and players play…
We consider the problem of bid prediction in repeated auctions and evaluate the performance of econometric methods for learning agents using a dataset from a mainstream sponsored search auction marketplace. Sponsored search auctions is a…
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…
We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with a single item for sale to multiple buyers with i.i.d. valuations. Akbarpour and Li (2020) show that the only optimal, credible, strategyproof auction is the ascending price auction with reserves…
We consider the sample complexity of revenue maximization for multiple bidders in unrestricted multi-dimensional settings. Specifically, we study the standard model of $n$ additive bidders whose values for $m$ heterogeneous items are drawn…
Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…
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 the efficiency of simple combinatorial auctions for the allocation of a set of items to a set of agents, with private subadditive valuation functions and budget constraints. The class we consider includes all auctions that allocate…
We study equilibria in two-buyer sequential second-price (or first-price) auctions for identical goods. Buyers have weakly decreasing incremental values, and we make a behavioural no-overbidding assumption: the buyers do not bid above their…
Incentives are key to the success of crowdsourcing which heavily depends on the level of user participation. This paper designs an incentive mechanism to motivate a heterogeneous crowd of users to actively participate in crowdsourcing…
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.…
When opposing parties compete for a prize, the sunk effort players exert during the conflict can affect the value of the winner's reward. These spillovers can have substantial influence on the equilibrium behavior of participants 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…
We propose a new architecture to approximately learn incentive compatible, revenue-maximizing auctions from sampled valuations. Our architecture uses the Sinkhorn algorithm to perform a differentiable bipartite matching which allows the…
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…
The Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction is the primary auction used for monetizing the use of the Internet. It is well-known that truthtelling is not a dominant strategy in this auction and that inefficient equilibria can arise. In this…
In this paper, we investigate the computation of second-price pacing equilibria (SPPEs), a foundational model in online advertising auctions. We present a polynomial-time algorithm for computing exact SPPEs in instances with a constant…
We examine trade-offs among stakeholders in ad auctions. Our metrics are the revenue for the utility of the auctioneer, the number of clicks for the utility of the users and the welfare for the utility of the advertisers. We show how to…