Related papers: Monotonicity, Revenue Equivalence and Budgets
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…
We study the problem of selling identical goods to n unit-demand bidders in a setting in which the total supply of goods is unknown to the mechanism. Items arrive dynamically, and the seller must make the allocation and payment decisions…
Mature internet advertising platforms offer high-level campaign management tools to help advertisers run their campaigns, often abstracting away the intricacies of how each ad is placed and focusing on aggregate metrics of interest to…
We consider the "Offline Ad Slot Scheduling" problem, where advertisers must be scheduled to "sponsored search" slots during a given period of time. Advertisers specify a budget constraint, as well as a maximum cost per click, and may not…
We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be…
Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
We study mechanism design for combinatorial cost sharing. Imagine that multiple items or services are available to be shared among a set of interested agents. The outcome of a mechanism in this setting consists of an assignment, determining…
We compare the expected efficiency of revenue maximizing (or {\em optimal}) mechanisms with that of efficiency maximizing ones. We show that the efficiency of the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling a single item with k + log_{e/(e-1)}…
We study the equilibria of uniform price auctions where many asymmetric bidders have flat demands up to their respective quantity constraints. We present an iterative procedure that systematically finds an equilibrium outcome as well as an…
We initiate the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. Our surplus-equitable mechanism is…
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…
Maximizing the revenue from selling _more than one_ good (or item) to a single buyer is a notoriously difficult problem, in stark contrast to the one-good case. For two goods, we show that simple "one-dimensional" mechanisms, such as…
In this paper we consider multidimensional mechanism design problem for selling discrete substitutable items to a group of buyers. Previous work on this problem mostly focus on stochastic description of valuations used by the seller.…
The ``impossibility theorem'' -- which is considered foundational in algorithmic fairness literature -- asserts that there must be trade-offs between common notions of fairness and performance when fitting statistical models, except in two…
A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct…
We study a type of reverse (procurement) auction problems in the presence of budget constraints. The general algorithmic problem is to purchase a set of resources, which come at a cost, so as not to exceed a given budget and at the same…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
We study the revenue comparison problem of auctions when the seller has a maxmin expected utility preference. The seller holds a set of priors around some reference belief, interpreted as an approximating model of the true probability law…
We consider a principal seller with $m$ heterogeneous products to sell to an additive buyer over independent items. The principal can offer an arbitrary menu of product bundles, but faces competition from smaller and more agile single-item…