Related papers: Optimal mechanisms with simple menus
A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…
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…
It is well-known that optimal (i.e., revenue-maximizing) selling mechanisms in multidimensional type spaces may involve randomization. We obtain conditions under which deterministic mechanisms are optimal for selling two identical,…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…
We study the problem of selling $n$ items to a single buyer with an additive valuation function. We consider the valuation of the items to be correlated, i.e., desirabilities of the buyer for the items are not drawn independently. Ideally,…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
We derive the revenue-optimal efficient (welfare-maximizing) mechanism in a general multidimensional mechanism design setting when type spaces -- that is, the underlying domains from which agents' values come from -- can capture arbitrarily…
A monopolist seller of multiple goods screens a buyer whose type is initially unknown to both but drawn from a commonly known distribution. The buyer privately learns about his type via a signal. We derive the seller's optimal mechanism in…
We consider an economic environment with one buyer and one seller. For a bundle $(t,q)\in [0,\infty[\times [0,1]=\mathbb{Z}$, $q$ refers to the winning probability of an object, and $t$ denotes the payment that the buyer makes. We consider…
The assortment problem in revenue management is the problem of deciding which subset of products to offer to consumers in order to maximise revenue. A simple and natural strategy is to select the best assortment out of all those that are…
A monopoly platform sells either a risky product (with unknown utility) or a safe product (with known utility) to agents who sequentially arrive and learn the utility of the risky product by the reporting of previous agents. It is costly…
We consider a mechanism design setting with a single item and a single buyer who is uncertain about the value of the item. Both the buyer and the seller have a common model for the buyer's value, but the buyer discovers her true value only…
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…
I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…
Using AI approaches to automatically design mechanisms has been a central research mission at the interface of AI and economics [Conitzer and Sandholm, 2002]. Previous approaches that attempt to design revenue optimal auctions for the…
We provide simple and approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms in the multi-item multi-bidder settings. We unify and improve all previous results, as well as generalize the results to broader cases. In particular, we prove that the better…
The question of the minimum menu-size for approximate (i.e., up-to-$\varepsilon$) Bayesian revenue maximization when selling two goods to an additive risk-neutral quasilinear buyer was introduced by Hart and Nisan (2013), who give an upper…
We introduce a model of infinite horizon linear dynamic optimization and obtain results concerning existence of solution and satisfaction of the competitive condition and transversality condition being unconditionally sufficient for…
We consider a principal seller with $m$ heterogeneous products to sell to an additive buyer over independent items. The principal can offer an arbitrary menu of product bundles, but faces competition from smaller and more agile single-item…