Related papers: eBay's Market Intermediation Problem
We continue the study of the performance for fixed-price mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem, and improve approximation ratios of welfare-optimal mechanisms in several settings. Specifically, in the case where only the buyer…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
We consider an intermediary's problem of dynamically matching demand and supply of heterogeneous types in a periodic-review fashion. More specifically, there are two disjoint sets of demand and supply types, and a reward associated with…
When a store sells items to customers, the store wishes to determine the prices of the items to maximize its profit. Intuitively, if the store sells the items with low (resp. high) prices, the customers buy more (resp. less) items, which…
We study revenue maximization by deterministic mechanisms for the simplest case for which Myerson's characterization does not hold: a single seller selling two items, with independently distributed values, to a single additive buyer. We…
Following the recent literature on make take fees policies, we consider an exchange wishing to set a suitable contract with several market makers in order to improve trading quality on its platform. To do so, we use a principal-agent…
We consider the problem of devising incentive strategies for viral marketing of a product. In particular, we assume that the seller can influence penetration of the product by offering two incentive programs: a) direct incentives to…
We study a general online combinatorial auction problem in algorithmic mechanism design. A provider allocates multiple types of capacity-limited resources to customers that arrive in a sequential and arbitrary manner. Each customer has a…
We study large markets with a single seller which can produce many types of goods, and many multi-minded buyers. The seller chooses posted prices for its many items, and the buyers purchase bundles to maximize their utility. For this…
We study the problem of finding the optimal bidding strategy for an advertiser in a multi-platform auction setting. The competition on a platform is captured by a value and a cost function, mapping bidding strategies to value and cost…
Budget-management systems are one of the key components of modern auction markets. Internet advertising platforms typically offer advertisers the possibility to pace the rate at which their budget is depleted, through budget-pacing…
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 two-agent single-item bilateral trade. Ideally, the trade should happen whenever the buyer's value for the item exceeds the seller's cost. However, the classical result of Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that no mechanism can…
Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…
Electricity market operators worldwide use mixed-integer linear programming to solve the allocation problem in wholesale electricity markets. Prices are typically determined based on the duals of relaxed versions of this optimization…
In the buyback problem, an algorithm observes a sequence of bids and must decide whether to accept each bid at the moment it arrives, subject to some constraints on the set of accepted bids. Decisions to reject bids are irrevocable, whereas…
Consider learning a decision support assistant to serve as an intermediary between (oracle) expert behavior and (imperfect) human behavior: At each time, the algorithm observes an action chosen by a fallible agent, and decides whether to…
If you recommend a product to me and I buy it, how much should you be paid by the seller? And if your sole interest is to maximize the amount paid to you by the seller for a sequence of recommendations, how should you recommend optimally if…
We study the optimal liquidation problem in a market model where the bid price follows a geometric pure jump process whose local characteristics are driven by an unobservable finite-state Markov chain and by the liquidation rate. This model…
Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…