Related papers: Prior-independent Auctions for Risk-averse Agents

The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…

With the increasing use of auctions in online advertising, there has been a large effort to study seller revenue maximization, following Myerson's seminal work, both theoretically and practically. We take the point of view of the buyer in…

We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…

Reserve prices are widely used in practice. The problem of designing revenue-optimal auctions based on reserve price has drawn much attention in the auction design community. Although they have been extensively studied, most developments…

The paper designs revenue-maximizing auction mechanisms for agents who aim to maximize their total obtained values rather than the classical quasi-linear utilities. Several models have been proposed to capture the behaviors of such agents…

The rise of auto-bidding has created challenges for ensuring advertiser incentive compatibility, particularly when advertisers delegate bidding to agents with high-level constraints. One challenge in defining incentive compatibility is the…

Bidding in simultaneous auctions is challenging because an agent's value for a good in one auction may depend on the uncertain outcome of other auctions: the so-called exposure problem. Given the gap in understanding of general simultaneous…

We study probabilistic single-item second-price auctions where the item is characterized by a set of attributes. The auctioneer knows the actual instantiation of all the attributes, but he may choose to reveal only a subset of these…

This paper reexamines the classic problem of revenue maximization in single-item auctions with $n$ buyers under the lens of the robust optimization framework. The celebrated Myerson's mechanism is the format that maximizes the seller's…

We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…

We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…

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…

In today's online advertising markets, it is common for advertisers to set long-term budgets. Correspondingly, advertising platforms adopt budget control methods to ensure that advertisers' payments lie within their budgets. Most budget…

We consider the problem of maximizing revenue for a monopolist offering multiple items to multiple heterogeneous buyers. We develop a simple mechanism that obtains a constant factor approximation under the assumption that the buyers' values…

We study the identification and estimation of first-price auction models where bidders have ambiguity about the valuation distribution and their preferences are represented by maxmin expected utility. When entry is exogenous, the…

A recent approach to automated mechanism design, differentiable economics, represents auctions by rich function approximators and optimizes their performance by gradient descent. The ideal auction architecture for differentiable economics…

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…

In this work we are concerned with the design of efficient mechanisms while eliciting limited information from the agents. First, we study the performance of sampling approximations in facility location games. Our key result is to show that…

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 consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…