Related papers: Revenue-Maximizing Mechanism Design for Quasi-Prop…
We study combinatorial auctions where each item is sold separately but simultaneously via a second price auction. We ask whether it is possible to efficiently compute in this game a pure Nash equilibrium with social welfare close to the…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
Combinatorial auctions are used to allocate resources in domains where bidders have complex preferences over bundles of goods. However, the behavior of bidders under different payment rules is not well understood, and there has been limited…
We initiate the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. Our surplus-equitable mechanism is…
We are interested in mechanisms that maximize social welfare. In [1] this problem was studied for multi-unit auctions with unit demand bidders and for the public project problem, and in each case social welfare undominated mechanisms in the…
We study $k$-price auctions in a complete information environment and characterize all pure-strategy Nash equilibrium outcomes. In a setting with $n$ agents having ordered valuations, we show that any agent, except those with the lowest…
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…
We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations. The extent of fairness of an allocation is measured by its Nash social welfare, which is the geometric mean of the valuations of the…
In a two-round auction, a subset of bidders is selected (probabilistically), according to their bids in the first round, for the second round, where they can increase their bids. We formalize the two-round auction model, restricting the…
We consider the problem of the optimization of bidding strategies in prior-dependent revenue-maximizing auctions, when the seller fixes the reserve prices based on the bid distributions. Our study is done in the setting where one bidder is…
We study the efficiency guarantees in the simple auction environment where the auctioneer has one unit of divisible good to be distributed among a number of budget constrained agents. With budget constraints, the social welfare cannot be…
We introduce draft auctions, which is a sequential auction format where at each iteration players bid for the right to buy items at a fixed price. We show that draft auctions offer an exponential improvement in social welfare at equilibrium…
Traditional methods for computing equilibria in auctions become computationally intractable as auction complexity increases, particularly in multi-item and dynamic auctions. This paper introduces a self-play based reinforcement learning…
We consider the problem of computing a (pure) Bayes-Nash equilibrium in the first-price auction with continuous value distributions and discrete bidding space. We prove that when bidders have independent subjective prior beliefs about the…
We introduce several new estimation methods that leverage shape constraints in auction models to estimate various objects of interest, including the distribution of a bidder's valuations, the bidder's ex ante expected surplus, and the…
A truthful mechanism for a Bayesian single-item auction results with some ex-ante revenue for the seller, and some ex-ante total surplus for the buyers. We study the Pareto frontier of the set of seller-buyers ex-ante utilities, generated…
Consider a seller that intends to auction some item. The seller can invest money and effort in advertising in different market segments in order to recruit $n$ bidders to the auction. Alternatively, the seller can have a much cheaper and…
The internet advertising market is a multi-billion dollar industry, in which advertisers buy thousands of ad placements every day by repeatedly participating in auctions. An important and ubiquitous feature of these auctions is the presence…
We study the pay-as-bid auction game, a supply function model with discriminatory pricing and asymmetric firms. In this game, strategies are non-decreasing supply functions relating pric to quantity and the exact choice of the strategy…
In settings where players have a limited access to liquidity, represented in the form of budget constraints, efficiency maximization has proven to be a challenging goal. In particular, the social welfare cannot be approximated by a better…