Related papers: Optimal Pricing is Hard
Along with substantial progress made recently in designing near-optimal mechanisms for multi-item auctions, interesting structural questions have also been raised and studied. In particular, is it true that the seller can always extract…
Myerson's seminal characterization of the revenue-optimal auction for a single item \cite{myerson1981optimal} remains a cornerstone of mechanism design. However, generalizing this framework to multi-item settings has proven exceptionally…
We present a general framework for proving polynomial sample complexity bounds for the problem of learning from samples the best auction in a class of "simple" auctions. Our framework captures all of the most prominent examples of "simple"…
We study the revenue maximization problem with an imprecisely estimated distribution of a single buyer or several independent and identically distributed buyers given that this estimation is not far away from the true distribution. We use…
This paper studies an online selection problem, where a seller seeks to sequentially sell multiple copies of an item to arriving buyers. We consider an adversarial setting, making no modeling assumptions about buyers' valuations for the…
The current art in optimal combinatorial auctions is limited to handling the case of single units of multiple items, with each bidder bidding on exactly one bundle (single minded bidders). This paper extends the current art by proposing an…
We consider a principal seller with $m$ heterogeneous products to sell to an additive buyer over independent items. The principal can offer an arbitrary menu of product bundles, but faces competition from smaller and more agile single-item…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
We study the following fundamental data-driven pricing problem. How can/should a decision-maker price its product based on data at a single historical price? How valuable is such data? We consider a decision-maker who optimizes over…
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…
Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bids reach the seller directly. We study how this picture changes when a revenue-maximizing intermediary controls access to the seller's auction. Motivated by blockchain auctions, online…
We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…
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…
We study the complexity of computing Bayes-Nash equilibria in single-item first-price auctions. We present the first efficient algorithms for the problem, when the bidders' values for the item are independently drawn from the same…
We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…
We consider revenue-optimal mechanism design in the interdimensional setting, where one dimension is the 'value' of the buyer, and one is a 'type' that captures some auxiliary information. One setting is the FedEx Problem, for which FGKK…
The Competition Complexity of an auction setting refers to the number of additional bidders necessary in order for the (deterministic, prior-independent, dominant strategy truthful) Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism to achieve greater revenue…
In markets with budget-constrained buyers, competitive equilibria need not be efficient in the utilitarian sense, or maximise the seller's revenue. We consider a setting with multiple divisible goods. Competitive equilibrium outcomes, and…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item auctions, where bidders have subadditive valuations over independent items. Providing a simple mechanism that is approximately revenue-optimal in this setting is a major open problem in mechanism…
We study the optimal auction design problem when bidders' preferences follow the maxmin expected utility model. We suppose that each bidder's set of priors consists of beliefs close to the seller's belief, where "closeness" is defined by a…