Related papers: Monotonicity, Revenue Equivalence and Budgets
We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…
Maximizing the revenue from selling two or more goods has been shown to require the use of $nonmonotonic$ mechanisms, where a higher-valuation buyer may pay less than a lower-valuation one. Here we show that the restriction to $monotonic$…
We study a classic Bayesian mechanism design setting of monopoly problem for an additive buyer in the presence of budgets. In this setting a monopolist seller with $m$ heterogeneous items faces a single buyer and seeks to maximize her…
We investigate revenue guarantees for auction mechanisms in a model where a distribution is specified for each bidder, but only some of the distributions are correct. The subset of bidders whose distribution is correctly specified…
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…
Auction is applied for trade with various mechanisms. A simple but practical question is which mechanism, typically first-price or second-price auctions, is preferred from the perspective of bidders or sellers. A celebrated answer is…
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 a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to…
Along with substantial progress made recently in designing near-optimal mechanisms for multi-item auctions, interesting structural questions have also been raised and studied. In particular, is it true that the seller can always extract…
We study robust mechanisms to sell a common-value good. We assume that the mechanism designer knows the prior distribution of the buyers' common value but is unsure of the buyers' information structure about the common value. We use linear…
There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by…
We show that the mechanism-design problem for a monopolist selling multiple, heterogeneous objects to a buyer with ex ante symmetric and additive values is equivalent to the mechanism-design problem for a monopolist selling identical…
We study the problem of a budget limited buyer who wants to buy a set of items, each from a different seller, to maximize her value. The budget feasible mechanism design problem aims to design a mechanism which incentivizes the sellers to…
We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…
Since economic mechanisms are often applied to very different instances of the same problem, it is desirable to identify mechanisms that work well in a wide range of circumstances. We pursue this goal for a position auction setting and…
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,…
We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue,…
In this paper, we consider the problem of designing incentive compatible auctions for multiple (homogeneous) units of a good, when bidders have private valuations and private budget constraints. When only the valuations are private and the…
The framework of budget-feasible mechanism design studies procurement auctions where the auctioneer (buyer) aims to maximize his valuation function subject to a hard budget constraint. We study the problem of designing truthful mechanisms…