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Related papers: Optimal Pricing is Hard

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We study auction design when a seller relies on machine-learning predictions of bidders' valuations that may be unreliable. Motivated by modern ML systems that are often accurate but occasionally fail in a way that is essentially…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Ilan Lobel , Humberto Moreira , Omar Mouchtaki

We provide sufficient conditions for revenue maximization in a two-good monopoly where the buyer's values for the items come from independent (but not necessarily identical) distributions over bounded intervals. Under certain distributional…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-11-24 Yiannis Giannakopoulos , Elias Koutsoupias

We study the design of truthful auctions for selling identical items in unlimited supply (e.g., digital goods) to n unit demand buyers. This classic problem stands out from profit-maximizing auction design literature as it requires no…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-01-07 Ning Chen , Nick Gravin , Pinyan Lu

We consider a repeated auction where the buyer's utility for an item depends on the time that elapsed since his last purchase. We present an algorithm to build the optimal bidding policy, and then, because optimal might be impractical, we…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-08-04 Benjamin Heymann , Alexandre Gilotte , Rémi Chan-Renous

Motivated by the problem of selling large, proprietary data, we consider an information pricing problem proposed by Bergemann et al. that involves a decision-making buyer and a monopolistic seller. The seller has access to the underlying…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Andrew Li , R. Ravi , Karan Singh , Zihong Yi , Weizhong Zhang

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Da Huo , Zhilin Zhang , Zhenzhe Zheng , Chuan Yu , Jian Xu , Fan Wu

In the quest for market mechanisms that are easy to implement, yet close to optimal, few seem as viable as posted pricing. Despite the growing body of impressive results, the performance of most posted price mechanisms however, rely…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-09-23 Shreyas Sekar

In this work, we study spectrum auction problem where each request from secondary users has spatial, temporal, and spectral features. With the requests of secondary users and the reserve price of the primary user, our goal is to design…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2013-05-29 Yu-e Sun , He Huang , Xiang-Yang Li , Zhili Chen , Wei Yang , Hongli Xu , Liusheng Huang

We study information design in click-through auctions, in which the bidders/advertisers bid for winning an opportunity to show their ads but only pay for realized clicks. The payment may or may not happen, and its probability is called the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Junjie Chen , Minming Li , Haifeng Xu , Song Zuo

We study the limits of an information intermediary in the classical Bayesian auction, where a revenue-maximizing seller sells one item to $n$ buyers with independent private values. In addition, we have an intermediary who knows the buyers'…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Reza Alijani , Siddhartha Banerjee , Kamesh Munagala , Kangning Wang

We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-09-18 Luca Anderlini , GaOn Kim

The auction theory literature has so far focused mostly on the design of mechanisms that takes the revenue or the efficiency as a yardstick. However, scenarios where the {\it capacity}, which we define as \textit{``the number of bidders the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2007-11-13 Sudhir Kumar Singh , Vwani P. Roychowdhury

We study the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-09-11 Michal Feldman , Brendan Lucier , Vasilis Syrgkanis

We study the computational complexity of finding fair allocations of indivisible goods in the setting where a social network on the agents is given. Notions of fairness in this context are "localized", that is, agents are only concerned…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-24 Neeldhara Misra , Debanuj Nayak

We examine the complexity of computing welfare- and revenue-maximizing equilibria in autobidding second-price auctions subject to return-on-spend (RoS) constraints. We show that computing an autobidding equilibrium that approximates the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Ioannis Anagnostides , Ian Gemp , Georgios Piliouras , Kelly Spendlove

We study the identification and estimation of first-price auction models where bidders have ambiguity about the valuation distribution and their preferences are represented by maxmin expected utility. When entry is exogenous, the…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2015-04-13 Gaurab Aryal , Dong-Hyuk Kim

In revenue maximization of selling a digital product in a social network, the utility of an agent is often considered to have two parts: a private valuation, and linearly additive influences from other agents. We study the incomplete…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-09-27 Wei Chen , Pinyan Lu , Xiaorui Sun , Bo Tang , Yajun Wang , Zeyuan Allen Zhu

In practice, auction data are often endogenously censored and anonymous, revealing only limited outcome statistics rather than full bid profiles. We study robust auction design when the seller observes only aggregated, anonymous order…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-26 Zhihao Gavin Tang , Shixin Wang

We study approximation algorithms for revenue maximization based on static item pricing, where a seller chooses prices for various goods in the market, and then the buyers purchase utility-maximizing bundles at these given prices. We…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-05-03 Elliot Anshelevich , Shreyas Sekar

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2009-09-30 Vahab Mirrokni , S. Muthukrishnan , Uri Nadav