Related papers: Knightian Auctions
We introduce the Funding Game, in which $m$ identical resources are to be allocated among $n$ selfish agents. Each agent requests a number of resources $x_i$ and reports a valuation $\tilde{v}_i(x_i)$, which verifiably {\em lower}-bounds…
Research on promoting cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents has often focused on the bi-objective optimisation problem: minimising the total incentive cost while maximising the frequency of cooperation. However, the optimal…
A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…
We consider an environment where sellers compete over buyers. All sellers are a-priori identical and strategically signal buyers about the product they sell. In a setting motivated by on-line advertising in display ad exchanges, where firms…
A canonical setting for non-monetary online resource allocation is one where agents compete over multiple rounds for a single item per round, with i.i.d. valuations and additive utilities across rounds. With $n$ symmetric agents, a natural…
Recent literature highlights the advantages of implementing social rules via dynamic game forms. We characterize when truth-telling remains a dominant strategy in gradual mechanisms implementing strategy-proof social rules, where agents…
We study how to allocate resources to participants who can strategically misrepresent their deservingness at a cost. A principal assigns item(s) (or money) among multiple agents on the basis of their costly signals. Each agent's signal…
A set of divisible resources becomes available over a sequence of rounds and needs to be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Our goal is to distribute these resources to maximize fairness and efficiency. Achieving any non-trivial…
Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to possess…
We propose a new model for aggregating preferences over a set of indivisible items based on a quantile value. In this model, each agent is endowed with a specific quantile, and the value of a given bundle is defined by the corresponding…
Game theory has been developed by scientists as a theory of strategic interaction among players who are supposed to be perfectly rational. These strategic interactions might have been presented in an auction, a business negotiation, a chess…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…
We study the efficiency guarantees in the simple auction environment where the auctioneer has one unit of divisible good to be distributed among a number of budget constrained agents. With budget constraints, the social welfare cannot be…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…
We consider a dynamic mechanism design problem where an auctioneer sells an indivisible good to groups of buyers in every round, for a total of $T$ rounds. The auctioneer aims to maximize their discounted overall revenue while adhering to a…
Econometric inference allows an analyst to back out the values of agents in a mechanism from the rules of the mechanism and bids of the agents. This paper gives an algorithm to solve the problem of inferring the values of agents in a…
We consider a selfish variant of the knapsack problem. In our version, the items are owned by agents, and each agent can misrepresent the set of items she owns---either by avoiding reporting some of them (understating), or by reporting…
Internet ad auctions have evolved from a few lines of text to richer informational layouts that include images, sitelinks, videos, etc. Ads in these new formats occupy varying amounts of space, and an advertiser can provide multiple…
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…