Related papers: Approximately Optimal Mechanism Design: Motivation…

Apart from the principles and methodologies inherited from Economics and Game Theory, the studies in Algorithmic Mechanism Design typically employ the worst-case analysis and approximation schemes of Theoretical Computer Science. For…

We study a repeated trading problem in which a mechanism designer facilitates trade between a single seller and multiple buyers. Our model generalizes the classic bilateral trade setting to a multi-buyer environment. Specifically, the…

We study the design of mechanisms in combinatorial auction domains. We focus on settings where the auction is repeated, motivated by auctions for licenses or advertising space. We consider models of agent behaviour in which they either…

Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic…

In many settings, money is a tool of exchange with minimal inherent utility --- agents will spend it in a way that maximizes the value of goods received subject to reasonable constraints, giving only second-order consideration to the…

We introduce the notion of rigidity in auction design and use it to analyze some fundamental aspects of mechanism design. We focus on single-item auctions where the values of the bidders are drawn from some (possibly correlated)…

It was recently shown in [http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.5518] that revenue optimization can be computationally efficiently reduced to welfare optimization in all multi-dimensional Bayesian auction problems with arbitrary (possibly…

The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…

We study the problem of a budget limited buyer who wants to buy a set of items, each from a different seller, to maximize her value. The budget feasible mechanism design problem aims to design a mechanism which incentivizes the sellers to…

Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application…

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 consider the problem of an auctioneer who faces the task of selling a good (drawn from a known distribution) to a set of buyers, when the auctioneer does not have the capacity to describe to the buyers the exact identity of the good that…

We present a general framework for proving polynomial sample complexity bounds for the problem of learning from samples the best auction in a class of "simple" auctions. Our framework captures all of the most prominent examples of "simple"…

This paper studies a joint design problem where a seller can design both the signal structures for the agents to learn their values, and the allocation and payment rules for selling the item. In his seminal work, Myerson (1981) shows how to…

In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…

We study the problem of social welfare maximization in bilateral trade, where two agents, a buyer and a seller, trade an indivisible item. We consider arguably the simplest form of mechanisms -- the fixed-price mechanisms, where the…

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…

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…

This survey outlines a general and modular theory for proving approximation guarantees for equilibria of auctions in complex settings. This theory complements traditional economic techniques, which generally focus on exact and optimal…

We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…