Related papers: Send Mixed Signals -- Earn More, Work Less
We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…
Budgets play a significant role in real-world sequential auction markets such as those implemented by internet companies. To maximize the value provided to auction participants, spending is smoothed across auctions so budgets are used for…
We investigate revenue guarantees for auction mechanisms in a model where a distribution is specified for each bidder, but only some of the distributions are correct. The subset of bidders whose distribution is correctly specified…
A patient seller aims to sell a good to an impatient buyer (i.e., one who discounts utility over time). The buyer will remain in the market for a period of time $T$, and her private value is drawn from a publicly known distribution. What is…
The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…
Matching markets are of particular interest in computer science and economics literature as they are often used to model real-world phenomena where we aim to equitably distribute a limited amount of resources to multiple agents and…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
We study multi-unit auctions in which bidders have limited knowledge of opponent strategies and values. We characterize optimal prior-free bids; these bids minimize the maximal loss in expected utility resulting from uncertainty surrounding…
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 Empirical Revenue Maximization (ERM) is one of the most important price learning algorithms in auction design: as the literature shows it can learn approximately optimal reserve prices for revenue-maximizing auctioneers in both repeated…
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 show that the multiplicative weight update method provides a simple recipe for designing and analyzing optimal Bayesian Incentive Compatible (BIC) auctions, and reduces the time complexity of the problem to pseudo-polynomial in…
A recurring theme in recent computer science literature is that proper design of signaling schemes is a crucial aspect of effective mechanisms aiming to optimize social welfare or revenue. One of the research endeavors of this line of work…
The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…
Time or money? That is a question! In this paper, we consider this dilemma in the pricing regime, in which we try to find the optimal pricing scheme for identical items with heterogenous time-sensitive buyers. We characterize the…
We study auctions with severe bounds on the communication allowed: each bidder may only transmit t bits of information to the auctioneer. We consider both welfare- and profit-maximizing auctions under this communication restriction. For…
Consider a market where a seller owns an item for sale and a buyer wants to purchase it. Each player has private information, known as their type. It can be costly and difficult for the players to reach an agreement through direct…
We study the communication complexity of incentive compatible auction-protocols between a monopolist seller and a single buyer with a combinatorial valuation function over $n$ items. Motivated by the fact that revenue-optimal auctions are…
Notifications are important for the user experience in mobile apps and can influence their engagement. However, too many notifications can be disruptive for users. A typical mobile app usually has several types of notification, managed by…
Bidding in simultaneous auctions is challenging because an agent's value for a good in one auction may depend on the uncertain outcome of other auctions: the so-called exposure problem. Given the gap in understanding of general simultaneous…