Related papers: Optimal Auctions for Correlated Buyers with Sampli…
We consider (approximate) revenue maximization in auctions where the distribution on input valuations is given via "black box" access to samples from the distribution. We observe that the number of samples required -- the sample complexity…
The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…
We focus on online second price auctions, where bids are made sequentially, and the winning bidder pays the maximum of the second-highest bid and a seller specified starting price. For many such auctions, the seller does not see all the…
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…
We study the bilateral trade problem where a seller owns a single indivisible item, and a potential buyer seeks to purchase it. Previous mechanisms for this problem only considered the case where the values of the buyer and the seller are…
We introduce several new estimation methods that leverage shape constraints in auction models to estimate various objects of interest, including the distribution of a bidder's valuations, the bidder's ex ante expected surplus, and the…
We consider an auction design problem where a seller sells multiple homogeneous items to a set of connected buyers. Each buyer only knows the buyers she directly connects with and has a diminishing marginal utility valuation for the items.…
This paper introduces the targeted sampling model in optimal auction design. In this model, the seller may specify a quantile interval and sample from a buyer's prior restricted to the interval. This can be interpreted as allowing the…
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…
This paper studies a robust version of the classic surplus extraction problem, in which the designer knows only that the beliefs of each type belong to some set, and designs mechanisms that are suitable for all possible beliefs in that set.…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
In diffusion auctions, sellers can leverage an underlying social network to broaden participation, thereby increasing their potential revenue. Specifically, sellers can incentivise participants in their auction to diffuse information about…
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…
Consider the problem of allocating goods to buyers through an auction. An auction is efficient if the resulting allocation maximizes total welfare, conditional on the information available. If buyers have private values, the…
Generating good revenue is one of the most important problems in Bayesian auction design, and many (approximately) optimal dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) Bayesian mechanisms have been constructed for various auction settings.…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
This paper develops a general approach, rooted in statistical learning theory, to learning an approximately revenue-maximizing auction from data. We introduce $t$-level auctions to interpolate between simple auctions, such as welfare…
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this…
Given a sample of bids from independent auctions, this paper examines the question of inference on auction fundamentals (e.g. valuation distributions, welfare measures) under weak assumptions on information structure. The question is…