Related papers: Efficiency-Revenue Trade-offs in Auctions
In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product,…
We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a selfish mediator who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. We consider a setting where the mediator does not have information advantage and the buyer's…
We investigate the tradeoffs between fairness and efficiency when allocating indivisible items over time. Suppose T items arrive over time and must be allocated upon arrival, immediately and irrevocably, to one of n agents. Agent i assigns…
Many online companies sell advertisement space in second-price auctions with reserve. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic method to learn a profitable strategy to set the reserve price. We use historical auction data with features to…
A seller chooses a reserve price in a second-price auction to maximize worst-case expected revenue when she knows only the mean of value distribution and an upper bound on either values themselves or variance. Values are private and iid.…
Autonomous robots are increasingly utilized in realistic scenarios with multiple complex tasks. In these scenarios, there may be a preferred way of completing all of the given tasks, but it is often in conflict with optimal execution.…
We consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…
We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item auctions, where bidders have subadditive valuations over independent items. Providing a simple mechanism that is approximately revenue-optimal in this setting is a major open problem in mechanism…
Multi-unit auctions are a paradigmatic model, where a seller brings multiple units of a good, while several buyers bring monetary endowments. It is well known that Walrasian equilibria do not always exist in this model, however compelling…
We provide a characterization of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanisms in settings where a monopolist sells k items over k periods to a buyer who realizes his value for item i in the beginning of period i. We require that the mechanism…
We consider a multi-round auction setting motivated by pay-per-click auctions for Internet advertising. In each round the auctioneer selects an advertiser and shows her ad, which is then either clicked or not. An advertiser derives value…
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 study the problem of selling a good to a group of bidders with interdependent values in a prior-free setting. Each bidder has a signal that can take one of $k$ different values, and her value for the good is a weakly increasing function…
Designing an incentive compatible auction that maximizes expected revenue is an intricate task. The single-item case was resolved in a seminal piece of work by Myerson in 1981, but more than 40 years later a full analytical understanding of…
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…
In prediction-based decision-making systems, different perspectives can be at odds: The short-term business goals of the decision makers are often in conflict with the decision subjects' wish to be treated fairly. Balancing these two…
In this paper, we consider the problem of designing incentive compatible auctions for multiple (homogeneous) units of a good, when bidders have private valuations and private budget constraints. When only the valuations are private and the…
Computational and economic results suggest that social welfare maximization and combinatorial auction design are much easier when bidders' valuations satisfy the "gross substitutes" condition. The goal of this paper is to evaluate…
This paper studies optimal auction design when valuations depend endogenously on post-auction collaboration between the seller and the winning bidder. Both parties exert non-contractible efforts after the auction, generating a double moral…