Related papers: Constrained Signaling in Auction Design
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
Emek et al. presented a model of probabilistic single-item second price auctions where an auctioneer who is informed about the type of an item for sale, broadcasts a signal about this type to uninformed bidders. They proved that finding the…
We study auctions with severe bounds on the communication allowed: each bidder may only transmit t bits of information to the auctioneer. We consider both welfare- and profit-maximizing auctions under this communication restriction. For…
We study the limits of an information intermediary in the classical Bayesian auction, where a revenue-maximizing seller sells one item to $n$ buyers with independent private values. In addition, we have an intermediary who knows the buyers'…
Sponsored search in E-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Taobao and Tmall provides sellers an effective way to reach potential buyers with most relevant purpose. In this paper, we study the auction mechanism optimization problem in…
This paper studies a joint design problem where a seller can design both the signal structures for the agents to learn their values, and the allocation and payment rules for selling the item. In his seminal work, Myerson (1981) shows how to…
This letter considers the design of an auction mechanism to sell the object of a seller when the buyers quantize their private value estimates regarding the object prior to communicating them to the seller. The designed auction mechanism…
Auctions have been proposed as a way to provide economic incentives for primary users to dynamically allocate unused spectrum to other users in need of it. Previously proposed schemes do not take into account the fact that the power…
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…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
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…
Auctions are markets with strict regulations governing the information available to traders in the market and the possible actions they can take. Since well designed auctions achieve desirable economic outcomes, they have been widely used…
The design of optimal auctions is a problem of interest in economics, game theory and computer science. Despite decades of effort, strategyproof, revenue-maximizing auction designs are still not known outside of restricted settings.…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
The optimal pricing problem is a fundamental problem that arises in combinatorial auctions. Suppose that there is one seller who has indivisible items and multiple buyers who want to purchase a combination of the items. The seller wants to…
Online advertising platforms are thriving due to the customizable audiences they offer advertisers. However, recent studies show that advertisements can be discriminatory with respect to the gender or race of the audience that sees the ad,…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
We study a novel class of mechanism design problems in which the outcomes are constrained by the payments. This basic class of mechanism design problems captures many common economic situations, and yet it has not been studied, to our…