Related papers: Profit Maximizing Prior-free Multi-unit Procuremen…
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…
We study risk-free bidding strategies in combinatorial auctions with incomplete information. Specifically, what is the maximum profit that a complement-free (subadditive) bidder can guarantee in a multi-item combinatorial auction? Suppose…
Situations where a group of agents come together to jointly buy a resource that they individually cannot afford to buy are commonly observed in markets. For example in the US market for radio spectrum, a recent proposal invited small firms…
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…
This note pursues two primary objectives. First, we analyze the outcomes of an all-pay auction within a store where buyers with and without financial constraints arrive at varying rates, and where buyer types are private information.…
Motivated by sponsored search auctions, we study multi-unit auctions with budget constraints. In the mechanism we propose, Sort-Cut, understating budgets or values is weakly dominated. Since Sort-Cut's revenue is increasing in budgets and…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
We consider budget feasible mechanisms for procurement auctions with additive valuation functions. For the divisible case, where agents can be allocated fractionally, there exists an optimal mechanism with approximation guarantee $e/(e-1)$…
Motivated by autobidding systems in online advertising, we study revenue maximization in markets with divisible goods and budget-constrained buyers with linear valuations. Our aim is to compute a single price for each good and an allocation…
We study revenue optimization pricing algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation. We show that, in the case when both the seller and the buyer…
We consider a robust version of the revenue maximization problem, where a single seller wishes to sell $n$ items to a single unit-demand buyer. In this robust version, the seller knows the buyer's marginal value distribution for each item…
The study of repeated interactions between a learner and a utility-maximizing optimizer has yielded deep insights into the manipulability of learning algorithms. However, existing literature primarily focuses on independent, unlinked…
In practice, most auction mechanisms are not strategy-proof, so equilibrium analysis is required to predict bidding behavior. In many auctions, though, an exact equilibrium is not known and one would like to understand whether -- manually…
Multi-unit auctions are a paradigmatic model, where a seller brings multiple units of a good, while several buyers bring monetary endowments. It is well known that Walrasian equilibria do not always exist in this model, however compelling…
This paper studies mechanism design for revenue maximization in a distribution-reporting setting, where the auctioneer does not know the buyers' true value distributions. Instead, each buyer reports and commits to a bid distribution in the…
We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing auctions for allocating multiple goods to flexible consumers. In our model, each consumer is interested in a subset of goods known as its flexibility set and wants to consume one good…
We study the bidding problem in repeated uniform price multi-unit auctions from the perspective of a value-maximizing buyer. The buyer aims to maximize their cumulative value over $T$ rounds while adhering to per-round return-on-investment…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
We study the problem of computing optimal prices for a version of the Product-Mix auction with budget constraints. In contrast to the ``standard'' Product-Mix auction, the objective is to maximize revenue instead of social welfare. We prove…
We study simple and approximately optimal auctions for agents with a particular form of risk-averse preferences. We show that, for symmetric agents, the optimal revenue (given a prior distribution over the agent preferences) can be…