Related papers: Sequential Posted Price Mechanisms with Correlated…
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 multi-buyer multi-item sequential item pricing mechanisms for revenue maximization with the goal of approximating a natural fractional relaxation -- the ex ante optimal revenue. We assume that buyers' values are subadditive but…
For revenue and welfare maximization in single-dimensional Bayesian settings, Chawla et al. (STOC10) recently showed that sequential posted-price mechanisms (SPMs), though simple in form, can perform surprisingly well compared to the…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…
A large fraction of online advertisement is sold via repeated second price auctions. In these auctions, the reserve price is the main tool for the auctioneer to boost revenues. In this work, we investigate the following question: Can…
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…
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…
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 study the asymptotic average-case efficiency of static and anonymous posted prices for $n$ agents and $m(n)$ multiple identical items with $m(n)=o\left(\frac{n}{\log n}\right)$. When valuations are drawn i.i.d from some fixed continuous…
We continue the study of the performance for fixed-price mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem, and improve approximation ratios of welfare-optimal mechanisms in several settings. Specifically, in the case where only the buyer…
A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…
We consider a fixed-price mechanism design setting where a seller sells one item via a social network, but the seller can only directly communicate with her neighbours initially. Each other node in the network is a potential buyer with a…
We consider the problem of designing a revenue-optimal mechanism in the two-item, single-buyer, unit-demand setting when the buyer's valuations, $(z_1, z_2)$, are uniformly distributed in an arbitrary rectangle $[c,c+b_1]\times[c,c+b_2]$ in…
In this paper, we present the first approximation algorithms for the problem of designing revenue optimal Bayesian incentive compatible auctions when there are multiple (heterogeneous) items and when bidders can have arbitrary demand and…
We consider job scheduling settings, with multiple machines, where jobs arrive online and choose a machine selfishly so as to minimize their cost. Our objective is the classic makespan minimization objective, which corresponds to the…
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…
We study the problem of selling a resource through an auction mechanism. The winning buyer in turn develops this resource to generate profit. Two forms of payment are considered: charging the winning buyer a one-time payment, or an initial…
Market-based mechanisms such as auctions are being studied as an appropriate means for resource allocation in distributed and mulitagent decision problems. When agents value resources in combination rather than in isolation, they must often…
We consider the design of a revenue-optimal mechanism when two items are available to be sold to a single buyer whose valuation is uniformly distributed over an arbitrary rectangle $[c_1,c_1+b_1]\times[c_2,c_2+b_2]$ in the positive…
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…