Related papers: Monotonicity, Revenue Equivalence and Budgets
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…
What fraction of the potential social surplus in an environment can be extracted by a revenue-maximizing monopolist? We investigate this problem in Bayesian single-parameter environments with independent private values. The precise answer…
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…
Mechanism design, a branch of economics, aims to design rules that can autonomously achieve desired outcomes in resource allocation and public decision making. The research on mechanism design using machine learning is called automated…
We consider budget constrained combinatorial auctions where bidder $i$ has a private value $v_i$, a budget $b_i$, and is interested in all the items in $S_i$. The value to agent $i$ of a set of items $R$ is $|R \cap S_i| \cdot v_i$. Such…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
We study Bayesian mechanism design problems in settings where agents have budgets. Specifically, an agent's utility for an outcome is given by his value for the outcome minus any payment he makes to the mechanism, as long as the payment is…
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…
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…
This paper studies mechanism design environments in which the designer does not know the distribution of agents' private information a priori and instead learns from agents' behavior induced by the mechanism itself. We formalize a notion of…
This paper studies when strategic understanding acquired in one mechanism can be transferred to another. We introduce a framework in which agents' knowledge is represented as a set of payoff comparisons they can make, and use it to…
A principal must decide between two options. Which one she prefers depends on the private information of two agents. One agent always prefers the first option; the other always prefers the second. Transfers are infeasible. One application…
We study the problem of allocating homogeneous and indivisible objects among agents with money. In particular, we investigate the relationship between egalitarian-equivalence (Pazner and Schmeidler, 1978), as a fairness concept, and…
Automated bidding, an emerging intelligent decision making paradigm powered by machine learning, has become popular in online advertising. Advertisers in automated bidding evaluate the cumulative utilities and have private financial…
A recent line of research has established a novel desideratum for designing approximately-revenue-optimal multi-item mechanisms, namely the buy-many constraint. Under this constraint, prices for different allocations made by the mechanism…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
We consider optimal mechanism design for the case with one buyer and two items. The buyer's valuations towards the two items are independent and additive. In this setting, optimal mechanism is unknown for general valuation distributions. We…
In this paper we show that payment computation essentially does not present any obstacle in designing truthful mechanisms, even for multi-parameter domains, and even when we can only call the allocation rule once. We present a general…
We consider an economic environment where a seller wants to sell an indivisible unit of good to a buyer. We show that revenue from any strategy-proof and individually rational mechanism defined on closed intervals of rich single crossing…
We present a polynomial-time algorithm that, given samples from the unknown valuation distribution of each bidder, learns an auction that approximately maximizes the auctioneer's revenue in a variety of single-parameter auction environments…