Related papers: Prior-independent Auctions for Risk-averse Agents
We develop multiattribute auctions that accommodate generalized additive independent (GAI) preferences. We propose an iterative auction mechanism that maintains prices on potentially overlapping GAI clusters of attributes, thus decreases…
We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
In classic auction theory, reserve prices are known to be effective for improving revenue for the auctioneer against quasi-linear utility maximizing bidders. The introduction of reserve prices, however, usually do not help improve total…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
This paper studies risk in a stochastic auction which facilitates the integration of renewable generation in electricity markets. We model market participants who are risk averse and reflect their risk aversion through coherent risk…
A seller wants to sell an item to $n$ buyers. Buyer valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution unknown to the seller; the seller only knows that the support is included in $[a, b]$. To be robust, the seller chooses a DSIC mechanism…
We consider the sample complexity of revenue maximization for multiple bidders in unrestricted multi-dimensional settings. Specifically, we study the standard model of $n$ additive bidders whose values for $m$ heterogeneous items are drawn…
Budget-feasible procurement has been a major paradigm in mechanism design since its introduction by Singer (2010). An auctioneer (buyer) with a strict budget constraint is interested in buying goods or services from a group of strategic…
We study auctions that are robust at any scale, i.e., they can be applied to sell both expensive and cheap items and achieve the best multiplicative approximations of the optimal revenue in the worst case. We show that the optimal mechanism…
In the context of advertising auctions, finding good reserve prices is a notoriously challenging learning problem. This is due to the heterogeneity of ad opportunity types and the non-convexity of the objective function. In this work, we…
In risk-sharing markets with aggregate uncertainty, characterizing Pareto-optimal allocations when agents might not be risk averse is a challenging task, and the literature has only provided limited explicit results thus far. In particular,…
We study the question of setting and testing reserve prices in single item auctions when the bidders are not identical. At a high level, there are two generalizations of the standard second price auction: in the lazy version we first…
We study revenue maximization when a seller offers $k$ identical units to ex ante heterogeneous, unit-demand buyers. While anonymous pricing can be $\Theta(\log k)$ worse than optimal in general multi-unit environments, we show that this…
We study the price of anarchy of the first-price auction in the autobidding world, where bidders can be either utility maximizers (i.e., traditional bidders) or value maximizers (i.e., autobidders). We show that with autobidders only, the…
In practice, auction data are often endogenously censored and anonymous, revealing only limited outcome statistics rather than full bid profiles. We study robust auction design when the seller observes only aggregated, anonymous order…
We present a polynomial-time algorithm that, given samples from the unknown valuation distribution of each bidder, learns an auction that approximately maximizes the auctioneer's revenue in a variety of single-parameter auction environments…
This paper develops the theory of mechanism redesign by which an auctioneer can reoptimize an auction based on bid data collected from previous iterations of the auction on bidders from the same market. We give a direct method for…
We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a…
DeMarzo et al. (2005) consider auctions in which bids are selected from a completely ordered family of securities whose values are tied to the resource being auctioned. The paper defines a notion of relative steepness of families of…