Related papers: Vickrey Auctions for Irregular Distributions
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…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
This paper investigates reverse auctions that involve continuous values of different types of goods, general nonconvex constraints, and second stage costs. We seek to design the payment rules and conditions under which coalitions of…
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 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…
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…
We consider the problem of maximizing revenue when selling k items to a single buyer with known valuation distributions. We show that for a single, additive buyer whose valuations for for the items are distributed according to i.i.d.…
Diffusion auction design for combinatorial settings is a long-standing challenge. One difficulty is that we cannot directly extend the solutions for simpler settings to combinatorial settings (like extending the Vickrey auction to VCG in…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
We provide algorithms that learn simple auctions whose revenue is approximately optimal in multi-item multi-bidder settings, for a wide range of valuations including unit-demand, additive, constrained additive, XOS, and subadditive. We…
We consider auction environments in which at the time of the auction bidders observe signals about their ex-post value. We introduce a model of novice bidders who do not know know the joint distribution of signals and instead build a…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
In the standard single-dimensional model of position auctions, bidders agree on the relative values of the positions and each of them submits a single bid that is interpreted in terms of these values. Motivated by current practice in…
We consider the problem of finding the (unique) minimal Walrasian equilibrium price in multi-item, multi-unit auction models: there are multiple indivisible items for sale, with several units of each item, and a bidder may be interested in…
Recurring auctions are ubiquitous for selling durable assets like artworks and homes, with follow-up auctions held for unsold items. We investigate such auctions theoretically and empirically. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that…
The standard framework of online bidding algorithm design assumes that the seller commits himself to faithfully implementing the rules of the adopted auction. However, the seller may attempt to cheat in execution to increase his revenue if…
This paper develops a general approach, rooted in statistical learning theory, to learning an approximately revenue-maximizing auction from data. We introduce $t$-level auctions to interpolate between simple auctions, such as welfare…
We provide a reduction from revenue maximization to welfare maximization in multi-dimensional Bayesian auctions with arbitrary (possibly combinatorial) feasibility constraints and independent bidders with arbitrary (possibly combinatorial)…
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…