Related papers: Multi-dimensional Virtual Values and Second-degree…

A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…

We consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not only to the…

We consider the problem of designing revenue-optimal auctions for selling two items and bidders' valuations are independent among bidders but negatively correlated among items. In this paper, we obtain the closed-form optimal auction for…

We consider the classical mathematical economics problem of {\em Bayesian optimal mechanism design} where a principal aims to optimize expected revenue when allocating resources to self-interested agents with preferences drawn from a known…

We consider the problem of maximizing portfolio value when an agent has a subjective view on asset value which differs from the traded market price. The agent's trades will have a price impact which affect the price at which the asset is…

We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…

We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…

We investigate a seller's revenue-maximizing mechanism in a setting where a desirable good is sold together with an undesirable bad (e.g., advertisements) that generates third-party revenue. The buyer's private information is…

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 introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…

We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed…

We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…

We consider an extension of the rollout algorithm that applies to constrained deterministic dynamic programming, including challenging combinatorial optimization problems. The algorithm relies on a suboptimal policy, called base heuristic.…

We study problems arising in real-time auction markets, common in e-commerce and computational advertising, where bidders face the problem of calculating optimal bids. We focus upon a contract management problem where a demand aggregator is…

We consider the differentiation of the value function for parametric optimization problems. Such problems are ubiquitous in Machine Learning applications such as structured support vector machines, matrix factorization and min-min or…

We characterize the extreme points of the set of incentive-compatible mechanisms for screening problems with linear utility. Our framework subsumes problems with and without transfers, such as monopoly pricing, principal-optimal bilateral…

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…

As computational agents are developed for increasingly complicated e-commerce applications, the complexity of the decisions they face demands advances in artificial intelligence techniques. For example, an agent representing a seller in an…

A principal wishes to transact business with a multidimensional distribution of agents whose preferences are known only in the aggregate. Assuming a twist (= generalized Spence-Mirrlees single-crossing) hypothesis and that agents can choose…

We study large markets with a single seller which can produce many types of goods, and many multi-minded buyers. The seller chooses posted prices for its many items, and the buyers purchase bundles to maximize their utility. For this…