Related papers: Approximately Optimal Mechanism Design: Motivation…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
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…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
An auction house cannot generally provide the optimal auction technology to every client. Instead it provides one or several auction technologies, and clients select the most appropriate one. For example, eBay provides ascending auctions…
Using AI approaches to automatically design mechanisms has been a central research mission at the interface of AI and economics [Conitzer and Sandholm, 2002]. Previous approaches that attempt to design revenue optimal auctions for the…
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…
From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to…
Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…
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…
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…
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,…
In this work, we study spectrum auction problem where each request from secondary users has spatial, temporal, and spectral features. With the requests of secondary users and the reserve price of the primary user, our goal is to design…
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…
Two sellers compete to sell identical products to a single buyer. Each seller chooses an arbitrary mechanism, possibly involving lotteries, to sell their product. The utility-maximizing buyer can choose to participate in one or both…
We study a novel class of mechanism design problems in which the outcomes are constrained by the payments. This basic class of mechanism design problems captures many common economic situations, and yet it has not been studied, to our…
Auctions are markets with strict regulations governing the information available to traders in the market and the possible actions they can take. Since well designed auctions achieve desirable economic outcomes, they have been widely used…
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…
This paper studies mechanism design for auctions with externalities on budgets, a novel setting where the budgets that bidders commit are adjusted due to the externality of the competitors' allocation outcomes-a departure from traditional…
In this work we are concerned with the design of efficient mechanisms while eliciting limited information from the agents. First, we study the performance of sampling approximations in facility location games. Our key result is to show that…