Related papers: Monotonicity, Revenue Equivalence and Budgets
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…
Multi-item mechanisms can be very complex offering many different bundles to the buyer that could even be randomized. Such complexity is thought to be necessary as the revenue gaps between randomized and deterministic mechanisms, or…
A fundamental assumption in classical mechanism design is that buyers are perfect optimizers. However, in practice, buyers may be limited by their computational capabilities or a lack of information, and may not be able to perfectly…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
We study the efficiency of simple combinatorial auctions for the allocation of a set of items to a set of agents, with private subadditive valuation functions and budget constraints. The class we consider includes all auctions that allocate…
Situations where a group of agents come together to jointly buy a resource that they individually cannot afford to buy are commonly observed in markets. For example in the US market for radio spectrum, a recent proposal invited small firms…
In markets such as digital advertising auctions, bidders want to maximize value rather than payoff. This is different to the utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes. We refer to…
We study independent private values auction environments in which the auctioneer's revenue depends nonlinearly on bidders' interim winning probabilities. Our framework accommodates heterogeneity among bidders and places no ad hoc…
We propose a new architecture to approximately learn incentive compatible, revenue-maximizing auctions from sampled valuations. Our architecture uses the Sinkhorn algorithm to perform a differentiable bipartite matching which allows the…
It is widely believed that computing payments needed to induce truthful bidding is somehow harder than simply computing the allocation. We show that the opposite is true: creating a randomized truthful mechanism is essentially as easy as a…
We present a general framework for designing approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms for multi-item additive auctions, which applies to both truthful and non-truthful auctions. Given a (not necessarily truthful) single-item auction format…
We provide a computationally efficient black-box reduction from mechanism design to algorithm design in very general settings. Specifically, we give an approximation-preserving reduction from truthfully maximizing \emph{any} objective under…
We provide simple and approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms in the multi-item multi-bidder settings. We unify and improve all previous results, as well as generalize the results to broader cases. In particular, we prove that the better…
We study the bilateral trade problem: one seller, one buyer and a single, indivisible item for sale. It is well known that there is no fully-efficient and incentive compatible mechanism for this problem that maintains a balanced budget. We…
This study explores the monotonicity of adaptive clinching auctions -- a key mechanism in budget-constrained auctions -- with respect to fluctuations in the number of bidders. Specifically, we investigate how the addition of new bidders…
We formulate and study the algorithmic mechanism design problem for a general class of resource allocation settings, where the center redistributes the private resources brought by individuals. Money transfer is forbidden. Distinct from the…
In this paper, we study sequential auctions with two budget constrained bidders and any number of identical items. All prior results on such auctions consider only two items. We construct a canonical outcome of the auction that is the only…
The all-pay auction, a classic competitive model, is widely applied in scenarios such as political elections, sports competitions, and research and development, where all participants pay their bids regardless of winning or losing. However,…
This paper considers Bayesian revenue maximization in the $k$-unit setting, where a monopolist seller has $k$ copies of an indivisible item and faces $n$ unit-demand buyers (whose value distributions can be non-identical). Four basic…
We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a…