Related papers: Coopetitive Ad Auctions
With spectrum auctions as our prime motivation, in this paper we analyze combinatorial auctions where agents' valuations exhibit complementarities. Assuming that the agents only value bundles of size at most $k$ and also assuming that we…
A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct…
The focus of classic mechanism design has been on truthful direct-revelation mechanisms. In the context of combinatorial auctions the truthful direct-revelation mechanism that maximizes social welfare is the VCG mechanism. For many…
We study $k$-price auctions in a complete information environment and characterize all pure-strategy Nash equilibrium outcomes. In a setting with $n$ agents having ordered valuations, we show that any agent, except those with the lowest…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
The first-price auction is popular in practice for its simplicity and transparency. Moreover, its potential virtues grow in complex settings where incentive compatible auctions may generate little or no revenue. Unfortunately, the…
We consider games in which players search for a hidden prize, and they have asymmetric information about the prize location. We study the social payoff in equilibria of these games. We present sufficient conditions for the existence of an…
We study the design of truthful auctions for selling identical items in unlimited supply (e.g., digital goods) to n unit demand buyers. This classic problem stands out from profit-maximizing auction design literature as it requires no…
We solve for the equilibrium dynamics of information sharing in a large population. Each agent is endowed with signals regarding the likely outcome of a random variable of common concern. Individuals choose the effort with which they search…
We consider a combinatorial auction setting where buyers have fractionally subadditive (XOS) valuations over the items and the seller's objective is to maximize the social welfare. A prophet inequality in this setting bounds the competitive…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
We study a model of competitive information design in an oligopoly search market with heterogeneous consumer search costs. A unique class of equilibria -- upper-censorship equilibria -- emerges under intense competition. In equilibrium,…
We consider a variant of the standard Bayesian mechanism, where players evaluate their outcomes and constraints in an ex-ante manner. Such a model captures a major form of modern online advertising where an advertiser is concerned with…
Motivated by online retail, we consider the problem of selling one item (e.g., an ad slot) to two non-excludable buyers (say, a merchant and a brand). This problem captures, for example, situations where a merchant and a brand cooperatively…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this class,…
We study the Price of Anarchy of mechanisms for the well-known problem of one-sided matching, or house allocation, with respect to the social welfare objective. We consider both ordinal mechanisms, where agents submit preference lists over…
Nearly fifteen years ago, Google unveiled the generalized second price (GSP) auction. By all theoretical accounts including their own [Varian 14], this was the wrong auction --- the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction would have been the…
The majority of online marketplaces offer promotion programs to sellers to acquire additional customers for their products. These programs typically allow sellers to allocate advertising budgets to promote their products, with higher…