Related papers: The Complexity of Optimal Mechanism Design
We study the multi-item mechanism design problem where a monopolist sells $n$ heterogeneous items to a single buyer. We focus on buy-many mechanisms, a natural class of mechanisms frequently used in practice. The buy-many property allows…
We consider a revenue-maximizing single seller with $m$ items for sale to a single buyer whose value $v(\cdot)$ for the items is drawn from a known distribution $D$ of support $k$. A series of works by Cai et al. establishes that when each…
We are interested in the setting where a seller sells sequentially arriving items, one per period, via a dynamic auction. At the beginning of each period, each buyer draws a private valuation for the item to be sold in that period and this…
We design an expected polynomial-time, truthful-in-expectation, (1-1/e)-approximation mechanism for welfare maximization in a fundamental class of combinatorial auctions. Our results apply to bidders with valuations that are m matroid rank…
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…
We study the communication complexity of dominant strategy implementations of combinatorial auctions. We start with two domains that are generally considered "easy": multi-unit auctions with decreasing marginal values and combinatorial…
We consider markets consisting of a set of indivisible items, and buyers that have {\em sharp} multi-unit demand. This means that each buyer $i$ wants a specific number $d_i$ of items; a bundle of size less than $d_i$ has no value, while a…
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…
We study independent private values auction environments in which the auctioneer's revenue depends nonlinearly on bidders' interim winning probabilities. Our framework accommodates heterogeneity among bidders and places no ad hoc…
We propose a new architecture to approximately learn incentive compatible, revenue-maximizing auctions from sampled valuations. Our architecture uses the Sinkhorn algorithm to perform a differentiable bipartite matching which allows the…
We reexamine the characterization of incentive compatible single-parameter mechanisms introduced in Archer & Tardos(2001). We argue that the claimed uniqueness result, called `Myerson's Lemma' was not well established. We provide an…
The common way to optimize auction and pricing systems is to set aside a small fraction of the traffic to run experiments. This leads to the question: how can we learn the most with the smallest amount of data? For truthful auctions, this…
We study combinatorial auctions where each item is sold separately but simultaneously via a second price auction. We ask whether it is possible to efficiently compute in this game a pure Nash equilibrium with social welfare close to the…
This paper considers Bayesian revenue maximization in the $k$-unit setting, where a monopolist seller has $k$ copies of an indivisible item and faces $n$ unit-demand buyers (whose value distributions can be non-identical). Four basic…
We cast the problem of combinatorial auction design in a Bayesian framework in order to incorporate prior information into the auction process and minimize the number of rounds to convergence. We first develop a generative model of agent…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
This work presents a descending-price-auction algorithm to obtain the maximum market-clearing price vector (MCP) in unit-demand matching markets with m items by exploiting the combinatorial structure. With a shrewd choice of goods for which…
We consider the problem of designing a revenue-optimal mechanism in the two-item, single-buyer, unit-demand setting when the buyer's valuations, $(z_1, z_2)$, are uniformly distributed in an arbitrary rectangle $[c,c+b_1]\times[c,c+b_2]$ in…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
Most recent papers addressing the algorithmic problem of allocating advertisement space for keywords in sponsored search auctions assume that pricing is done via a first-price auction, which does not realistically model the Generalized…