Related papers: Limits of Efficiency in Sequential Auctions
We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…
We study competitive equilibria in the classic Shapley-Shubik assignment model with indivisible goods and unit-demand buyers, with budget constraints: buyers can specify a maximum price they are willing to pay for each item, beyond which…
We present a general framework for designing approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms for multi-item additive auctions, which applies to both truthful and non-truthful auctions. Given a (not necessarily truthful) single-item auction format…
This paper studies a setting in which multiple suppliers compete for a buyer's procurement business. The buyer faces uncertain demand and there is a requirement to reserve capacity in advance of knowing the demand. Each supplier has costs…
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…
We study a class of manipulations in combinatorial auctions where bidders fundamentally misrepresent what goods they are interested in. Prior work has largely assumed that bidders only submit bids on their bundles of interest, which we call…
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'…
Combinatorial auctions are used to allocate resources in domains where bidders have complex preferences over bundles of goods. However, the behavior of bidders under different payment rules is not well understood, and there has been limited…
We study how a budget-constrained bidder should learn to adaptively bid in repeated first-price auctions to maximize her cumulative payoff. This problem arose due to an industry-wide shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions…
Lately, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), i.e., uniquely discernible assets on a blockchain, have skyrocketed in popularity by addressing a broad audience. However, the typical NFT auctioning procedures are conducted in various, ad hoc ways,…
Equilibria in auctions can be very difficult to analyze, beyond the symmetric environments where revenue equivalence renders the analysis straightforward. This paper takes a robust approach to evaluating the equilibria of auctions. Rather…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
We study the pay-as-bid auction game, a supply function model with discriminatory pricing and asymmetric firms. In this game, strategies are non-decreasing supply functions relating pric to quantity and the exact choice of the strategy…
We study the problem of computing an approximate Nash equilibrium of a game whose strategy space is continuous without access to gradients of the utility function. Such games arise, for example, when players' strategies are represented by…
This survey outlines a general and modular theory for proving approximation guarantees for equilibria of auctions in complex settings. This theory complements traditional economic techniques, which generally focus on exact and optimal…
We quantify the value of the monopoly's bargaining power in terms of competition complexity--that is, the number of additional bidders the monopoly must attract in simple auctions to match the expected revenue of the optimal mechanisms…
Complements between goods - where one good takes on added value in the presence of another - have been a thorn in the side of algorithmic mechanism designers. On the one hand, complements are common in the standard motivating applications…
We study the complexity of finding an approximate (pure) Bayesian Nash equilibrium in a first-price auction with common priors when the tie-breaking rule is part of the input. We show that the problem is PPAD-complete even when the…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
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…