Related papers: Optimal Platform Design
Two sellers compete to sell identical products to a single buyer. Each seller chooses an arbitrary mechanism, possibly involving lotteries, to sell their product. The utility-maximizing buyer can choose to participate in one or both…
A prevalent market structure in the Internet economy consists of buyers and sellers connected by a platform (such as Amazon or eBay) that acts as an intermediary and keeps a share of the revenue of each transaction. While the optimal…
Crowdsourcing has become an important tool to collect data for various artificial intelligence applications and auction can be an effective way to allocate work and determine reward in a crowdsourcing platform. In this paper, we focus on…
We study procurement auctions, where an auctioneer seeks to acquire services from strategic sellers with private costs. The quality of services is measured by a submodular function known to the auctioneer. Our goal is to design…
We analyze the problem of how to optimally bid for ad spaces in online ad auctions. For this we consider the general case of multiple ad campaigns with overlapping targeting criteria. In our analysis we first characterize the structure of…
Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…
Cloud containers represent a new, light-weight alternative to virtual machines in cloud computing. A user job may be described by a container graph that specifies the resource profile of each container and container dependence relations.…
Inspired by Internet ad auction applications, we study the problem of allocating a single item via an auction when bidders place very different values on the item. We formulate this as the problem of prior-free auction and focus on…
In markets such as digital advertising auctions, bidders want to maximize value rather than payoff. This is different to the utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes. We refer to…
In digital goods auctions, there is an auctioneer who sells an item with unlimited supply to a set of potential buyers, and the objective is to design truthful auction to maximize the total profit of the auctioneer. Motivated from an…
Online bidding serves as a fundamental information system in mobile ecosystems, facilitating real-time ad allocation across billions of devices while optimizing both platform performance and user experience through data-driven decision…
Fairness in advertising is a topic of particular concern motivated by theoretical and empirical observations in both the computer science and economics literature. We examine the problem of fairness in advertising for general purpose…
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…
Modern online platforms rely on effective rating systems to learn about items. We consider the optimal design of rating systems that collect binary feedback after transactions. We make three contributions. First, we formalize the…
On e-commerce platforms, sellers typically bid for impressions from ad traffic to promote their products. However, for most sellers, the majority of their sales come from organic traffic. Consequently, the relationship between their ad…
Sponsored search in E-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Taobao and Tmall provides sellers an effective way to reach potential buyers with most relevant purpose. In this paper, we study the auction mechanism optimization problem in…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…
Classical Bayesian mechanism design relies on the common prior assumption, but such prior is often not available in practice. We study the design of prior-independent mechanisms that relax this assumption: the seller is selling an…
We study the design of mechanisms -- e.g., auctions -- when the designer does not control information flows between mechanism participants. A mechanism equilibrium is leakage-proof if no player conditions their actions on leaked…