Related papers: Prior-independent Auctions for Risk-averse Agents
A central problem in Microeconomics is to design auctions with good revenue properties. In this setting, the bidders' valuations for the items are private knowledge, but they are drawn from publicly known prior distributions. The goal is to…
Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…
We study reserve prices in auctions with independent private values when bidders are expectations-based loss averse. We find that the optimal public reserve price excludes fewer bidder types than under risk neutrality. Moreover, we show…
In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…
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…
In practice, most auction mechanisms are not strategy-proof, so equilibrium analysis is required to predict bidding behavior. In many auctions, though, an exact equilibrium is not known and one would like to understand whether -- manually…
We consider the provision of an abstract service to single-dimensional agents. Our model includes position auctions, single-minded combinatorial auctions, and constrained matching markets. When the agents' values are drawn from a…
Designing truthful, revenue maximizing auctions is a core problem of auction design. Multi-item settings have long been elusive. Recent work (arXiv:1706.03459) introduces effective deep learning techniques to find such auctions for the…
I construct a novel random double auction as a robust bilateral trading mechanism for a profit-maximizing intermediary who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. It works as follows. The intermediary publicly commits to charging a…
We obtain revenue guarantees for the simple pricing mechanism of a single posted price, in terms of a natural parameter of the distribution of buyers' valuations. Our revenue guarantee applies to the single item n buyers setting, with…
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…
We study the problem of repeatedly auctioning off an item to one of $k$ bidders where: a) bidders have a per-round individual rationality constraint, b) bidders may leave the mechanism at any point, and c) the bidders' valuations are…
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 develop efficient algorithms to construct utility maximizing mechanisms in the presence of risk averse players (buyers and sellers) in Bayesian settings. We model risk aversion by a concave utility function, and players play…
We study the efficiency guarantees in the simple auction environment where the auctioneer has one unit of divisible good to be distributed among a number of budget constrained agents. With budget constraints, the social welfare cannot be…
We propose an empirical method to analyze data from first-price procurements where bidders are asymmetric in their risk-aversion (CRRA) coefficients and distributions of private costs. Our Bayesian approach evaluates the likelihood by…
This paper shows how to identify and estimate the seller's risk parameter in an ascending auction. We consider a semiparametric model where the seller has a parametric utility function (such as CARA or CRRA) and the distribution of bidder…
We study dynamic mechanisms for optimizing revenue in repeated auctions, that are robust to heterogeneous forward-looking and learning behavior of the buyers. Typically it is assumed that the buyers are either all myopic or are all infinite…
This paper studies mechanism design for revenue maximization in a distribution-reporting setting, where the auctioneer does not know the buyers' true value distributions. Instead, each buyer reports and commits to a bid distribution in the…
We introduce several new estimation methods that leverage shape constraints in auction models to estimate various objects of interest, including the distribution of a bidder's valuations, the bidder's ex ante expected surplus, and the…