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We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a selfish mediator who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. We consider a setting where the mediator does not have information advantage and the buyer's…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Zhikang Fan , Weiran Shen , Shaojie Tang , Yao Wang

I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-10 Peiran Xiao

A recent line of research has established a novel desideratum for designing approximately-revenue-optimal multi-item mechanisms, namely the buy-many constraint. Under this constraint, prices for different allocations made by the mechanism…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Shuchi Chawla , Rojin Rezvan , Yifeng Teng , Christos Tzamos

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Gagan Aggarwal , Kshipra Bhawalkar , Guru Guruganesh , Andres Perlroth

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Tomer Ezra , Daniel Schoepflin , Ariel Shaulker

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Will Ma

We investigate a seller's revenue-maximizing mechanism in a setting where a desirable good is sold together with an undesirable bad (e.g., advertisements) that generates third-party revenue. The buyer's private information is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-02 Kolagani Paramahamsa

We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-06-07 Ian Kash , Rafael Frongillo

We consider a model of bilateral trade with private values. The value of the buyer and the cost of the seller are jointly distributed. The true joint distribution is unknown to the designer, however, the marginal distributions of the value…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-01-02 Komal Malik

In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-02-15 Nick Gravin , Zhihao Gavin Tang

The role of a market maker is to simultaneously offer to buy and sell quantities of goods, often a financial asset such as a share, at specified prices. An automated market maker (AMM) is a mechanism that offers to trade according to some…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Michael J. Curry , Zhou Fan , David C. Parkes

In persuasion problems where the receiver's action is one-dimensional and his utility is single-peaked, optimal signals are characterized by duality, based on a first-order approach to the receiver's problem. A signal is optimal iff the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-08-31 Anton Kolotilin , Roberto Corrao , Alexander Wolitzky

We consider revenue-optimal mechanism design in the interdimensional setting, where one dimension is the 'value' of the buyer, and one is a 'type' that captures some auxiliary information. One setting is the FedEx Problem, for which FGKK…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Nikhil Devanur , Kira Goldner , Raghuvansh Saxena , Ariel Schvartzman , S. Matthew Weinberg

A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-07-15 Komal Malik , Kolagani Paramahamsa

We study a classical Bayesian mechanism design problem where a seller is selling multiple items to multiple buyers. We consider the case where the seller has costs to produce the items, and these costs are private information to the seller.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-04-20 Yang Cai , Mingfei Zhao

This paper reexamines the classic problem of revenue maximization in single-item auctions with $n$ buyers under the lens of the robust optimization framework. The celebrated Myerson's mechanism is the format that maximizes the seller's…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Nick Gravin , Zhiqi Wang

We consider a principal seller with $m$ heterogeneous products to sell to an additive buyer over independent items. The principal can offer an arbitrary menu of product bundles, but faces competition from smaller and more agile single-item…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Moshe Babaioff , Linda Cai , Brendan Lucier

I study the welfare-maximizing allocation of heterogeneous goods when monetary transfers are prohibited. Agents have private values, and the designer chooses a mechanism subject to incentive compatibility and aggregate supply constraints. I…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-26 Filip Tokarski

We study undominated mechanisms with transfers for regulating a monopolist who privately observes the marginal cost of production. We show that in any undominated mechanism, there is a quantity floor, which depends only on the primitives,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-05-13 Debasis Mishra , Sanket Patil

Consider a monopolist selling $n$ items to an additive buyer whose item values are drawn from independent distributions $F_1,F_2,\ldots,F_n$ possibly having unbounded support. Unlike in the single-item case, it is well known that the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-04-13 Moshe Babaioff , Yannai A. Gonczarowski , Noam Nisan