Related papers: Mechanism Design via Optimal Transport
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…
We consider the problem of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanism design in settings where agents' types evolve over time as a function of their (both public and private) experience with items that are auctioned repeatedly over an infinite…
I study the design of auctions in which the auctioneer is assumed to have information only about the marginal distribution of a generic bidder's valuation, but does not know the correlation structure of the joint distribution of bidders'…
The development of the Internet of Things (IoT) generates a significant amount of data that contains valuable knowledge for system operations and business opportunities. Since the data is the property of the IoT data owners, the access to…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
Mechanism design, a branch of economics, aims to design rules that can autonomously achieve desired outcomes in resource allocation and public decision making. The research on mechanism design using machine learning is called automated…
Diffusion auction design is a new trend in mechanism design for which the main goal is to incentivize existing buyers to invite new buyers, who are their neighbors on a social network, to join an auction even though they are competitors.…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
We study the problem of characterizing revenue optimal auctions for single-minded buyers. Each buyer is interested only in a specific bundle of items and has a value for the same. Both his bundle and its value are his private information.…
Designing an incentive compatible auction that maximizes expected revenue is an intricate task. The single-item case was resolved in a seminal piece of work by Myerson in 1981, but more than 40 years later a full analytical understanding of…
Multi-item revenue-optimal mechanisms are known to be extremely complex, often offering buyers randomized lotteries of goods. In the standard buy-one model, it is known that optimal mechanisms can yield revenue infinitely higher than that…
We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $m$ heterogeneous items and a single buyer whose valuation $v$ for the items may exhibit both substitutes (i.e., for some $S, T$, $v(S \cup T) < v(S) + v(T)$) and complements (i.e., for some $S,…
We study the classic single-item auction setting of Myerson, but under the assumption that the buyers' values for the item are distributed over finite supports. Using strong LP duality and polyhedral theory, we rederive various key results…
We show that, in a resource allocation problem, the ex ante aggregate utility of players with cumulative-prospect-theoretic preferences can be increased over deterministic allocations by implementing lotteries. We formulate an optimization…
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…
We provide an elementary proof that revenue-maximizing mechanisms exist in multi-parameter settings whenever the distribution of valuations has finite expectation.
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…
Maximizing the revenue from selling _more than one_ good (or item) to a single buyer is a notoriously difficult problem, in stark contrast to the one-good case. For two goods, we show that simple "one-dimensional" mechanisms, such as…
We introduce a new numerical framework to learn optimal bidding strategies in repeated auctions when the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. Crucially, we do not assume that the bidders know what optimization mechanism is used…
The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…