Related papers: Mechanism Design for Data Science
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 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…
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…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
An auction house cannot generally provide the optimal auction technology to every client. Instead it provides one or several auction technologies, and clients select the most appropriate one. For example, eBay provides ascending auctions…
Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…
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…
The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…
Algorithms increasingly automate bidding in online auctions, raising concerns about tacit bid suppression and revenue shortfalls. Prior work identifies individual mechanisms behind algorithmic bid suppression, but it remains unclear which…
Over the past few years, more and more Internet advertisers have started using automated bidding for optimizing their advertising campaigns. Such advertisers have an optimization goal (e.g. to maximize conversions), and some constraints…
One of the most celebrated results in mechanism design is Myerson's characterization of the revenue optimal auction for selling a single item. However, this result relies heavily on the assumption that buyers are indifferent to risk. In…
In this study, we apply reinforcement learning techniques and propose what we call reinforcement mechanism design to tackle the dynamic pricing problem in sponsored search auctions. In contrast to previous game-theoretical approaches that…
We study the optimal auction design problem when bidders' preferences follow the maxmin expected utility model. We suppose that each bidder's set of priors consists of beliefs close to the seller's belief, where "closeness" is defined by a…
Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
In the mechanism design theory, a designer would like to implement a desired social choice function which specifies her favorite outcome for each possible profile of all agents' types. Traditionally, the designer may be in a dilemma in the…
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…
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…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
The auction theory literature has so far focused mostly on the design of mechanisms that takes the revenue or the efficiency as a yardstick. However, scenarios where the {\it capacity}, which we define as \textit{``the number of bidders the…