Related papers: Clinching Auctions Beyond Hard Budget Constraints
We introduce the notion of rigidity in auction design and use it to analyze some fundamental aspects of mechanism design. We focus on single-item auctions where the values of the bidders are drawn from some (possibly correlated)…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic…
Digital advertising constitutes one of the main revenue sources for online platforms. In recent years, some advertisers tend to adopt auto-bidding tools to facilitate advertising performance optimization, making the classical \emph{utility…
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…
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 study revenue maximization in multi-item auctions, where bidders have subadditive valuations over independent items. Providing a simple mechanism that is approximately revenue-optimal in this setting is a major open problem in mechanism…
We study multi-agent contract design with combinatorial actions, under budget constraints, and for a broad class of objective functions, including profit (principal's utility), reward, and welfare. Our first result is a strong…
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…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
This paper considers prior-independent mechanism design, namely identifying a single mechanism that has near optimal performance on every prior distribution. We show that mechanisms with truthtelling equilibria, a.k.a., revelation…
We study the problem of auction design for advertising platforms that face strategic advertisers who are bidding across platforms. Each advertiser's goal is to maximize their total value or conversions while satisfying some constraint(s)…
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…
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…
The classic result of Bulow and Klemperer (1996) shows that in multi-unit auctions with $m$ units and $n\geq m$ buyers whose values are sampled i.i.d. from a regular distribution, the revenue of the VCG auction with $m$ additional buyers is…
We study the design of truthful auctions for selling identical items in unlimited supply (e.g., digital goods) to n unit demand buyers. This classic problem stands out from profit-maximizing auction design literature as it requires no…
We address the problem of improving bidders' strategies in prior-dependent revenue-maximizing auctions and introduce a simple and generic method to design novel bidding strategies if the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. We…
We study the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…
We study multidimensional mechanism design in a common scenario where players have private information about their willingness to pay and their ability to pay. We provide a complete characterization of dominant-strategy incentive-compatible…