Related papers: Optimistic-Conservative Bidding in Sequential Auct…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
The convergence properties of learning dynamics in repeated auctions is a timely and important question, with numerous applications in, e.g., online advertising markets. This work focuses on repeated first-price auctions where bidders with…
With the increasing use of auctions in online advertising, there has been a large effort to study seller revenue maximization, following Myerson's seminal work, both theoretically and practically. We take the point of view of the buyer in…
We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue,…
We develop conditions under which individual choices and Walrasian equilibrium prices and allocations can be exactly inferred from finite market data. First, we consider market data that consist of individual demands as prices and incomes…
We advance empirical equilibrium analysis (Velez and Brown, 2020, arXiv:1907.12408) of the winner-bid and loser-bid auctions for the dissolution of a partnership. We show, in a complete information environment, that even though these…
We propose a new all-pay auction format in which risk-loving bidders pay a constant fee each time they bid for an object whose monetary value is common knowledge among the bidders, and bidding fees are the only source of benefit for the…
The all-pay auction, a classic competitive model, is widely applied in scenarios such as political elections, sports competitions, and research and development, where all participants pay their bids regardless of winning or losing. However,…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions with budget constraints. In each period, the decision maker needs to submit a bid to win the auction and maximize the total collected reward, subject to…
We consider the question of whether collusion among bidders (a "bidding ring") can be supported in equilibrium of unrepeated first-price auctions. Unlike previous work on the topic such as that by McAfee and McMillan [1992] and Marshall and…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
We consider a package assignment problem with multiple units of indivisible items. The seller can specify preferences over partitions of their supply between buyers as packaging costs. We propose incremental costs together with a graph that…
We provide efficient estimation methods for first- and second-price auctions under independent (asymmetric) private values and partial observability. Given a finite set of observations, each comprising the identity of the winner and the…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…
We study the inefficiency of mixed equilibria, expressed as the price of anarchy, of all-pay auctions in three different environments: combinatorial, multi-unit and single-item auctions. First, we consider item-bidding combinatorial…
A prevalent assumption in auction theory is that the auctioneer has full control over the market and that the allocation she dictates is final. In practice, however, agents might be able to resell acquired items in an aftermarket. A…
We study the revenue comparison problem of auctions when the seller has a maxmin expected utility preference. The seller holds a set of priors around some reference belief, interpreted as an approximating model of the true probability law…
Our paper concerns the computation of Nash equilibria of first-price auctions with correlated values. While there exist several equilibrium computation methods for auctions with independent values, the correlation of the bidders' values…
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…