Related papers: Strong Duality for a Multiple-Good Monopolist
We develop a method to solve, theoretically and numerically, general optimal stopping problems. Our general setting allows for multiple exercise rights, i.e., optimal multiple stopping, for a robust evaluation that accounts for model…
We study how to optimally segment monopolistic markets with a redistributive objective. We characterize optimal redistributive segmentations and show that they (i) induce the seller to price progressively, i.e., charge richer consumers…
Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…
Distributionally robust optimization has been shown to offer a principled way to regularize learning models. In this paper, we find that Tikhonov regularization is distributionally robust in an optimal transport sense (i.e., if an adversary…
Posted price mechanisms are prevalent in allocating goods within online marketplaces due to their simplicity and practical efficiency. We explore a fundamental scenario where buyers' valuations are independent and identically distributed,…
Situations where a group of agents come together to jointly buy a resource that they individually cannot afford to buy are commonly observed in markets. For example in the US market for radio spectrum, a recent proposal invited small firms…
We study optimal mass transport problems between two measures with respect to a non-traditional cost function, i.e. a cost $c$ which can attain the value $+\infty$. We define the notion of $c$-compatibility and strong-$c$-compatibility of…
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…
We establish a variant of Monge--Kantorovich duality for a constrained optimal transport problem with a continuum of agents, a finite set of alternatives, and general linear constraints. As an application, we revisit the large-market model…
This paper studies some basic problems in a multiple-object auction model using methodologies from theoretical computer science. We are especially concerned with situations where an adversary bidder knows the bidding algorithms of all the…
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…
We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the…
We characterize the extreme points of the set of incentive-compatible mechanisms for screening problems with linear utility. Our framework subsumes problems with and without transfers, such as monopoly pricing, principal-optimal bilateral…
It is well-known that selling different goods in a single bundle can significantly increase revenue. However, bundling is no longer profitable if the goods have high production costs. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a new…
We analyze a nonlinear pricing model where the seller controls both product pricing (screening) and buyer information about their own values (persuasion). We prove that the optimal mechanism always consists of finitely many signals and…
A seminal result of Bulow and Klemperer [1989] demonstrates the power of competition for extracting revenue: when selling a single item to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn i.i.d. from a regular distribution, the simple welfare-maximizing…
A wide variety of problems in machine learning, including exemplar clustering, document summarization, and sensor placement, can be cast as constrained submodular maximization problems. Unfortunately, the resulting submodular optimization…
The sequential allocation protocol is a simple and popular mechanism to allocate indivisible goods, in which the agents take turns to pick the items according to a predefined sequence. While this protocol is not strategy-proof, it has been…
We consider the modified Monge-Kantorovich problem with additional restriction: admissible transport plans must vanish on some fixed functional subspace. Different choice of the subspace leads to different additional properties optimal…
The problem of designing a profit-maximizing, Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanism with flexible consumers and costly heterogeneous supply is considered. In our setup, each consumer is associated with a…