Related papers: Bidding under Uncertainty: Theory and Experiments
In today's online advertising markets, a crucial requirement for an advertiser is to control her total expenditure within a time horizon under some budget. Among various budget control methods, throttling has emerged as a popular choice,…
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,…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
In most of microeconomic theory, consumers are assumed to exhibit decreasing marginal utilities. This paper considers combinatorial auctions among such submodular buyers. The valuations of such buyers are placed within a hierarchy of…
We compute equilibrium strategies in multi-stage games with continuous signal and action spaces as they are widely used in the management sciences and economics. Examples include sequential sales via auctions, multi-stage elimination…
We study sequential procurement auctions where the sellers are provided with a ``best and final offer'' (BAFO) strategy. This strategy allows each seller $i$ to effectively ``freeze'' their price while remaining active in the auction, and…
We provide a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for the Bayesian optimal multi-item multi-bidder auction problem under two conditions. First, bidders are independent, have additive valuations and are from the same population.…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions with budget constraints. In each period, the decision maker needs to submit a bid to win the auction and maximize the total collected reward, subject to…
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…
Markov decision processes (MDPs) are a popular model for performance analysis and optimization of stochastic systems. The parameters of stochastic behavior of MDPs are estimates from empirical observations of a system; their values are not…
The optimal pricing problem is a fundamental problem that arises in combinatorial auctions. Suppose that there is one seller who has indivisible items and multiple buyers who want to purchase a combination of the items. The seller wants to…
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 study a model of auction design where a seller is selling a set of objects to a set of agents who can be assigned no more than one object. Each agent's preference over (object, payment) pair need not be quasilinear. If the domain…
Over the last decade, digital media (web or app publishers) generalized the use of real time ad auctions to sell their ad spaces. Multiple auction platforms, also called Supply-Side Platforms (SSP), were created. Because of this…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…
We study risk-free bidding strategies in combinatorial auctions with incomplete information. Specifically, what is the maximum profit that a complement-free (subadditive) bidder can guarantee in a multi-item combinatorial auction? Suppose…
In digital goods auctions, there is an auctioneer who sells an item with unlimited supply to a set of potential buyers, and the objective is to design truthful auction to maximize the total profit of the auctioneer. Motivated from an…
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…
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…
In this paper, we initiate the study of the multiplicative bidding language adopted by major Internet search companies. In multiplicative bidding, the effective bid on a particular search auction is the product of a base bid and bid…