Related papers: A Note on Selling Optimally Two Uniformly Distribu…
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…
We consider the revenue maximization problem of a monopolist via a non-Myersonian approach that could generalize to multiple items and multiple buyers. Although such an approach does not lead to any closed-form solution of the problem, it…
We provide simple and approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms in the multi-item multi-bidder settings. We unify and improve all previous results, as well as generalize the results to broader cases. In particular, we prove that the better…
We study the problem of selling information to a data-buyer who faces a decision problem under uncertainty. We consider the classic Bayesian decision-theoretic model pioneered by [Blackwell, 1951, 1953]. Initially, the data buyer has only…
We consider markets consisting of a set of indivisible items, and buyers that have {\em sharp} multi-unit demand. This means that each buyer $i$ wants a specific number $d_i$ of items; a bundle of size less than $d_i$ has no value, while a…
We study the bilateral trade problem: one seller, one buyer and a single, indivisible item for sale. It is well known that there is no fully-efficient and incentive compatible mechanism for this problem that maintains a balanced budget. We…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…
We study problems arising in real-time auction markets, common in e-commerce and computational advertising, where bidders face the problem of calculating optimal bids. We focus upon a contract management problem where a demand aggregator is…
When selling information products, the seller can provide some free partial information to change people's valuations so that the overall revenue can possibly be increased. We study the general problem of advertising information products by…
We study revenue maximization when a seller offers $k$ identical units to ex ante heterogeneous, unit-demand buyers. While anonymous pricing can be $\Theta(\log k)$ worse than optimal in general multi-unit environments, we show that this…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
Myerson derived a simple and elegant solution to the single-parameter revenue-maximization problem in his seminal work on optimal auction design assuming the usual model of quasi-linear utilities. In this paper, we consider a slight…
We study a new model of complementary valuations, which we call "proportional complementarities." In contrast to common models, such as hypergraphic valuations, in our model, we do not assume that the extra value derived from owning a set…
We apply marginal analysis \`a la Bulow and Roberts (1989) to characterize revenue-maximizing selling mechanisms for a multiproduct monopoly. We derive marginal revenue from price perturbations over arbitrary sets of bundles and show that…
A seller chooses a reserve price in a second-price auction to maximize worst-case expected revenue when she knows only the mean of value distribution and an upper bound on either values themselves or variance. Values are private and iid.…
We consider a robust version of the revenue maximization problem, where a single seller wishes to sell $n$ items to a single unit-demand buyer. In this robust version, the seller knows the buyer's marginal value distribution for each item…
Consider a seller with m heterogeneous items for sale to a single additive buyer whose values for the items are arbitrarily correlated. It was previously shown that, in such settings, distributions exist for which the seller's optimal…
We consider the Item Pricing problem for revenue maximization in the limited supply setting, where a single seller with $n$ items caters to $m$ buyers with unknown subadditive valuation functions who arrive in a sequence. The seller sets…
In this paper we consider a distributed optimization scenario in which a set of agents has to solve a convex optimization problem with separable cost function, local constraint sets and a coupling inequality constraint. We propose a novel…