Related papers: Resource allocation with costly participation
Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…
The enhanced competition paradigm is an attempt at bridging the gap between simple and optimal auctions. In this line of work, given an auction setting with $m$ items and $n$ bidders, the goal is to find the smallest $n' \geq n$ such that…
We study an all-pay contest in which players with low abilities are filtered out before competing for prizes. We consider a setting where the designer admits a certain number of top players. The admitted players update their beliefs based…
Consider a seller that intends to auction some item. The seller can invest money and effort in advertising in different market segments in order to recruit $n$ bidders to the auction. Alternatively, the seller can have a much cheaper and…
In today's economy, selling a new zero-marginal cost product is a real challenge, as it is difficult to determine a product's "correct" sales price based on its profit and dissemination. As an example, think of the price of a new app or…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
We provide simple and approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms in the multi-item multi-bidder settings. We unify and improve all previous results, as well as generalize the results to broader cases. In particular, we prove that the better…
Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…
In a sponsored search auction the advertisement slots on a search result page are generally ordered by click-through rate. Bidders have a valuation, which is usually assumed to be linear in the click-through rate, a budget constraint, and…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
We introduce the notion of rigidity in auction design and use it to analyze some fundamental aspects of mechanism design. We focus on single-item auctions where the values of the bidders are drawn from some (possibly correlated)…
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…
In this paper we introduce and study {\em all-pay bidding games}, a class of two player, zero-sum games on graphs. The game proceeds as follows. We place a token on some vertex in the graph and assign budgets to the two players. Each turn,…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
We construct prior-free auctions with constant-factor approximation guarantees with ordered bidders, in both unlimited and limited supply settings. We compare the expected revenue of our auctions on a bid vector to the monotone price…
The online ads trading platform plays a crucial role in connecting publishers and advertisers and generates tremendous value in facilitating the convenience of our lives. It has been evolving into a more and more complicated structure. In…
This study explores the design of an efficient rebate policy in auction markets, focusing on a continuous-time setting with competition among market participants. In this model, a stock exchange collects transaction fees from auction…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
Innovative auction methods can be exploited to increase profits, with Shubik's famous "dollar auction" perhaps being the most widely known example. Recently, some mainstream e-commerce web sites have apparently achieved the same end on a…
This paper extends the incomplete model of Haile and Tamer (2003) from static English auctions to sequential English auctions. Because bidders may wait for future opportunities, the static condition that bidders do not let rivals win at…