Related papers: Learning Valuation Distributions from Partial Obse…
Consider a seller that intends to auction some item. The seller can invest money and effort in advertising in different market segments in order to recruit $n$ bidders to the auction. Alternatively, the seller can have a much cheaper and…
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…
In the standard formulation of mechanism design, a key assumption is that the designer has reliable information and technology to determine a prior distribution on types of the agents. In the meanwhile, as pointed out by the Wilson's…
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…
In this paper, we study the non-stationary online second price auction problem. We assume that the seller is selling the same type of items in $T$ rounds by the second price auction, and she can set the reserve price in each round. In each…
Two classes of distributions that are widely used in the analysis of Bayesian auctions are the Monotone Hazard Rate (MHR) and Regular distributions. They can both be characterized in terms of the rate of change of the associated virtual…
Auction is the common paradigm for resource allocation which is a fundamental problem in human society. Existing research indicates that the two primary objectives, the seller's revenue and the allocation efficiency, are generally…
Budget management strategies in repeated auctions have received growing attention in online advertising markets. However, previous work on budget management in online bidding mainly focused on second-price auctions. The rapid shift from…
In online combinatorial allocations/auctions, n bidders sequentially arrive, each with a combinatorial valuation (such as submodular/XOS) over subsets of m indivisible items. The aim is to immediately allocate a subset of the remaining…
The classic result of Bulow and Klemperer \cite{BK96} says that in a single-item auction recruiting one more bidder and running the Vickrey auction achieves a higher revenue than the optimal auction's revenue on the original set of bidders,…
In auction theory, cryptography has been used to achieve anonymity of the participants, security and privacy of the bids, secure computation and to simulate mediator (auctioneer). Auction theory focuses on revenue and Cryptography focuses…
This work proposes a bid shading strategy for first-price auctions as a measure-valued optimization problem. We consider a standard parametric form for bid shading and formulate the problem as convex optimization over the joint distribution…
We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions on those…
Auction is applied for trade with various mechanisms. A simple but practical question is which mechanism, typically first-price or second-price auctions, is preferred from the perspective of bidders or sellers. A celebrated answer is…
On ad exchange platforms the place for advertisement is sold through different kinds of auctions. However, it is not uncommon the situation where the seller repeatedly encounters only one buyer, thus the posted price auction degenerates…
Motivated by practical constraints in online advertising, we investigate single-parameter auction design for bidders with constraints on their Return On Investment (ROI) -- a targeted minimum ratio between the obtained value and the…
This paper studies a simplicity notion in a mechanism design setting in which agents do not necessarily share a common prior. I develop a model in which agents participate in a prior-free game of (coarse) information acquisition followed by…
The existing literature on optimal auctions focuses on optimizing the expected revenue of the seller, and is appropriate for risk-neutral sellers. In this paper, we identify good mechanisms for risk-averse sellers. As is standard in the…
Motivated by online advertising auctions, we consider repeated Vickrey auctions where goods of unknown value are sold sequentially and bidders only learn (potentially noisy) information about a good's value once it is purchased. We adopt an…
We establish nonparametric identification of auction models with continuous and nonseparable unobserved heterogeneity using three consecutive order statistics of bids. We then propose sieve maximum likelihood estimators for the joint…