Related papers: Optimal Auctions for Correlated Buyers with Sampli…
We model a procurement scenario in which two \textit{imperfect} bidders act simultaneously on behalf of a single buyer, a configuration common in display advertising and referred to as \textit{side-by-side bidding} but largely unexplored in…
We study the optimal auction design problem when bidders' preferences follow the maxmin expected utility model. We suppose that each bidder's set of priors consists of beliefs close to the seller's belief, where "closeness" is defined by a…
This paper considers a distributionally robust chance constraint model with a general ambiguity set. We show that a sample based approximation of this model converges under suitable sufficient conditions. We also show that upper and lower…
In recent years, a new branch of auction models called diffusion auction has extended the traditional auction into social network scenarios. The diffusion auction models the auction as a networked market whose nodes are potential customers…
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…
Investigating potential purchases is often a substantial investment under uncertainty. Standard market designs, such as simultaneous or English auctions, compound this with uncertainty about the price a bidder will have to pay in order to…
We study probabilistic single-item second-price auctions where the item is characterized by a set of attributes. The auctioneer knows the actual instantiation of all the attributes, but he may choose to reveal only a subset of these…
We consider an auction of identical digital goods to customers whose valuations are drawn independently from known distributions. Myerson's classic result identifies the truthful mechanism that maximizes the seller's expected profit. Under…
We study an auction setting in which bidders bid for placement of their content within a summary generated by a large language model (LLM), e.g., an ad auction in which the display is a summary paragraph of multiple ads. This generalizes…
We study the revenue maximization problem with an imprecisely estimated distribution of a single buyer or several independent and identically distributed buyers given that this estimation is not far away from the true distribution. We use…
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 exhibit incentive compatible multi-unit auctions that are not affine maximizers (i.e., are not of the VCG family) and yet approximate the social welfare to within a factor of $1+\epsilon$. For the case of two-item two-bidder auctions we…
A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the…
In digital goods auctions, there is an auctioneer who sells an item with unlimited supply to a set of potential buyers, and the objective is to design truthful auction to maximize the total profit of the auctioneer. Motivated from an…
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…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…
We study efficiency loss in Bayesian revenue optimal auctions. We quantify this as the worst case ratio of loss in the realized social welfare to the social welfare that can be realized by an efficient auction. Our focus is on auctions with…
For selling a single item to agents with independent but non-identically distributed values, the revenue optimal auction is complex. With respect to it, Hartline and Roughgarden (2009) showed that the approximation factor of the…
I consider an environment in which a decision maker faces uncertainty and privately holds information in the form of a signal about the true state of the world. The decision maker purchases additional information from a data broker before…