Related papers: Limits of Efficiency in Sequential Auctions
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…
The progressive second-price auction of Lazar and Semret is a decentralized mechanism for the allocation and real-time pricing of a divisible resource. Our focus is on how delays in the receipt of bid messages, asynchronous analysis by…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…
We study how increasing competition, by making prizes more unequal, affects effort in contests. In a finite type-space environment, we characterize the equilibrium, analyze the effect of competition under linear costs, and identify…
In quasi-proportional auctions, each bidder receives a fraction of the allocation equal to the weight of their bid divided by the sum of weights of all bids, where each bid's weight is determined by a weight function. We study the…
In modern advertising platforms, learning algorithms are deployed by budget-constrained bidders to maximize their accumulated value. These algorithms often offer classical utility guarantees like no-regret, i.e., the agent's utility is at…
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…
We initiate the study of the social welfare loss caused by corrupt auctioneers, both in single-item and multi-unit auctions. In our model, the auctioneer may collude with the winning bidders by letting them lower their bids in exchange for…
We derive optimal strategies for a bidding agent that participates in multiple, simultaneous second-price auctions with perfect substitutes. We prove that, if everyone else bids locally in a single auction, the global bidder should always…
We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…
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…
In this paper, we study how a budget-constrained bidder should learn to bid adaptively in repeated first-price auctions to maximize cumulative payoff. This problem arises from the recent industry-wide shift from second-price auctions to…
We study the bidding problem in repeated uniform price multi-unit auctions from the perspective of a value-maximizing buyer. The buyer aims to maximize their cumulative value over $T$ rounds while adhering to per-round return-on-investment…
In most of microeconomic theory, consumers are assumed to exhibit decreasing marginal utilities. This paper considers combinatorial auctions among such submodular buyers. The valuations of such buyers are placed within a hierarchy of…
This paper studies markets where a set of indivisible items is sold to bidders with quasilinear, unit-demand valuations, subject to a hard budget constraint. Without financial constraints the well-known assignment market model of Shapley…
A central problem in Microeconomics is to design auctions with good revenue properties. In this setting, the bidders' valuations for the items are private knowledge, but they are drawn from publicly known prior distributions. The goal is to…
Auctions via social network, pioneered by Li et al. (2017), have been attracting considerable attention in the literature of mechanism design for auctions. However, no known mechanism has satisfied strategy-proofness, non-deficit,…
Deterministic auctions are attractive in practice due to their transparency, simplicity, and ease of implementation, motivating a sharper understanding of when they can attain the same outcomes as randomized mechanisms. We study…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…