Related papers: Continuous Value Function Approximation for Sequen…
How do we assign value to economic transactions? To answer this question, we must consider whether the value of objects is inherent, is a product of social interaction, or involves other mechanisms. Economic theory predicts that there is an…
Sponsored search auctions are commonly modeled as an assignment of a fixed set of slots (positions) to a set of advertisers, with welfare maximization being reducible to a standard matching problem. Motivated by modern ad formats, we study…
Auctions are important mechanisms extensively implemented in various markets, e.g., search engines' keyword auctions, antique auctions, etc. Finding an optimal auction mechanism is extremely difficult due to the constraints of imperfect…
We consider the challenge of preference elicitation in systems that help users discover the most desirable item(s) within a given database. Past work on preference elicitation focused on structured models that provide a factored…
Algorithmic pricing is the computational problem that sellers (e.g., in supermarkets) face when trying to set prices for their items to maximize their profit in the presence of a known demand. Guruswami et al. (2005) propose this problem…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product,…
We consider some classical optimization problems in path planning and network transport, and we introduce new auction-based algorithms for their optimal and suboptimal solution. The algorithms are based on mathematical ideas that are…
We study the approximate dynamic programming approach to revenue management in the context of attended home delivery. We draw on results from dynamic programming theory for Markov decision problems, convex optimisation and discrete convex…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
Allocating scarce resources among agents to maximize global utility is, in general, computationally challenging. We focus on problems where resources enable agents to execute actions in stochastic environments, modeled as Markov decision…
Most modern financial markets use a continuous double auction mechanism to store and match orders and facilitate trading. In this paper we develop a microscopic dynamical statistical model for the continuous double auction under the…
A simple mechanism for allocating indivisible resources is sequential allocation in which agents take turns to pick items. We focus on possible and necessary allocation problems, checking whether allocations of a given form occur in some or…
The interaction between discrete and continuous mathematics lies at the heart of many fundamental problems in applied mathematics and computational sciences. In this paper we discuss the problem of discretizing vector-valued functions…
In fair division of indivisible goods, using sequences of sincere choices (or picking sequences) is a natural way to allocate the objects. The idea is as follows: at each stage, a designated agent picks one object among those that remain.…
We study the optimal behavior of a bidder in a real-time auction subject to the requirement that a specified collections of heterogeneous items be acquired within given time constraints. The problem facing this bidder is cast as a…
We present an algorithm to approximate the solutions to variational problems where set of admissible functions consists of convex functions. The main motivator behind this numerical method is estimating solutions to Adverse Selection…
We study a general online combinatorial auction problem in algorithmic mechanism design. A provider allocates multiple types of capacity-limited resources to customers that arrive in a sequential and arbitrary manner. Each customer has a…
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…
Consider a setting where selfish agents are to be assigned to coalitions or projects from a fixed set P. Each project k is characterized by a valuation function; v_k(S) is the value generated by a set S of agents working on project k. We…