Related papers: Valuation Compressions in VCG-Based Combinatorial …
We study resource allocation problems in which a central planner allocates resources among strategic agents with private cost functions in order to minimize a social cost, defined as an aggregate of the agents' costs. This setting poses two…
Auction design for the modern advertising market has gained significant prominence in the field of game theory. With the recent rise of auto-bidding tools, an increasing number of advertisers in the market are utilizing these tools for…
We exhibit incentive compatible multi-unit auctions that are not affine maximizers (i.e., are not of the VCG family) and yet approximate the social welfare to within a factor of $1+\epsilon$. For the case of two-item two-bidder auctions we…
Market-based mechanisms such as auctions are being studied as an appropriate means for resource allocation in distributed and mulitagent decision problems. When agents value resources in combination rather than in isolation, they must often…
We introduce several new estimation methods that leverage shape constraints in auction models to estimate various objects of interest, including the distribution of a bidder's valuations, the bidder's ex ante expected surplus, and the…
VCG is a classical combinatorial auction that maximizes social welfare. However, while the standard single-item Vickrey auction is false-name-proof, a major failure of multi-item VCG is its vulnerability to false-name attacks. This occurs…
In this work we are concerned with the design of efficient mechanisms while eliciting limited information from the agents. First, we study the performance of sampling approximations in facility location games. Our key result is to show that…
We study the social efficiency of several well-known mechanisms for the allocation of a set of available (advertising) positions to a set of competing budget-constrained users (advertisers). Specifically, we focus on the Generalized Second…
The Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism is infamously revenue non-monotone in combinatorial auctions. I.e., when a buyer increases their value for a bundle of items, the total auction revenue may decrease. Combinatorial auctions exhibit…
We obtain revenue guarantees for the simple pricing mechanism of a single posted price, in terms of a natural parameter of the distribution of buyers' valuations. Our revenue guarantee applies to the single item n buyers setting, with…
We consider auctions in which the players have very limited knowledge about their own valuations. Specifically, the only information that a Knightian player $i$ has about the profile of true valuations, $\theta^*$, consists of a set of…
Incentive compatibility (IC) is one of the most fundamental properties of an auction mechanism, including those used for online advertising. Recent methods by Feng et al. and Lahaie et al. show that counterfactual runs of the auction…
Given a sample of bids from independent auctions, this paper examines the question of inference on auction fundamentals (e.g. valuation distributions, welfare measures) under weak assumptions on information structure. The question is…
A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct…
The enduring value of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism has been highlighted due to its adoption by Facebook ad auctions. Our research delves into its utility in the collaborative virtual goods production (CVGP) game, which finds…
We present a new type of monotone submodular functions: \emph{multi-peak submodular functions}. Roughly speaking, given a family of sets $\cF$, we construct a monotone submodular function $f$ with a high value $f(S)$ for every set $S \in…
We present a computationally-efficient truthful mechanism for combinatorial auctions with subadditive bidders that achieves an $O((\log\!\log{m})^3)$-approximation to the maximum welfare in expectation using $O(n)$ demand queries; here $m$…
We study anonymous posted price mechanisms for combinatorial auctions in a Bayesian framework. In a posted price mechanism, item prices are posted, then the consumers approach the seller sequentially in an arbitrary order, each purchasing…
A prevalent assumption in auction theory is that the auctioneer has full control over the market and that the allocation she dictates is final. In practice, however, agents might be able to resell acquired items in an aftermarket. A…
We study revenue maximization in settings where agents' values are interdependent: each agent receives a signal drawn from a correlated distribution and agents' values are functions of all of the signals. We introduce a variant of the…