Related papers: Prior-free Auctions for Budgeted Agents
We explore the approximation power of deterministic obviously strategy-proof mechanisms in auctions, where the objective is welfare maximization. A trivial ascending auction on the grand bundle guarantees an approximation of $\min\{m,n\}$…
This paper considers prior-independent mechanism design, in which a single mechanism is designed to achieve approximately optimal performance on every prior distribution from a given class. Most results in this literature focus on…
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…
We study the classical rent division problem, where $n$ agents must allocate $n$ indivisible rooms and split a fixed total rent $R$. The goal is to compute an envy-free (EF) allocation, where no agent prefers another agent's room and rent…
We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…
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…
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…
We present pricing mechanisms for several online resource allocation problems which obtain tight or nearly tight approximations to social welfare. In our settings, buyers arrive online and purchase bundles of items; buyers' values for the…
This paper proves that the welfare of the first price auction in Bayes-Nash equilibrium is at least a $.743$-fraction of the welfare of the optimal mechanism assuming agents' values are independently distributed. The previous best bound was…
One of the most celebrated results in mechanism design is Myerson's characterization of the revenue optimal auction for selling a single item. However, this result relies heavily on the assumption that buyers are indifferent to risk. In…
We propose a notion of fairness for allocation problems in which different agents may have different reservation utilities, stemming from different outside options, or property rights. Fairness is usually understood as the absence of envy,…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
The framework of budget-feasible mechanism design studies procurement auctions where the auctioneer (buyer) aims to maximize his valuation function subject to a hard budget constraint. We study the problem of designing truthful mechanisms…
House Allocations concern with matchings involving one-sided preferences, where houses serve as a proxy encoding valuable indivisible resources (e.g. organs, course seats, subsidized public housing units) to be allocated among the agents.…
Envy-freeness is a standard benchmark of fairness in resource allocation. Since it cannot always be satisfied when the resource consists of indivisible items even when there are two agents, the relaxations envy-freeness up to one item (EF1)…
In many repeated auction settings, participants care not only about how frequently they win but also how their winnings are distributed over time. This problem arises in various practical domains where avoiding congested demand is crucial,…
This paper studies equilibrium quality of semi-separable position auctions (known as the Ad Types setting) with greedy or optimal allocation combined with generalized second-price (GSP) or Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) pricing. We make three…
We study the problem of fairly allocating $m$ indivisible items among $n$ agents. Envy-free allocations, in which each agent prefers her bundle to the bundle of every other agent, need not exist in the worst case. However, when agents have…
The fair allocation of scarce resources is a central problem in mathematics, computer science, operations research, and economics. While much of the fair-division literature assumes that individuals have underlying cardinal preferences,…
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…