Related papers: Optimal Auctions vs. Anonymous Pricing
We consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…
Bidding in simultaneous auctions is challenging because an agent's value for a good in one auction may depend on the uncertain outcome of other auctions: the so-called exposure problem. Given the gap in understanding of general simultaneous…
Recent work has addressed the algorithmic problem of allocating advertisement space for keywords in sponsored search auctions so as to maximize revenue, most of which assume that pricing is done via a first-price auction. This does not…
This paper studies some basic problems in a multiple-object auction model using methodologies from theoretical computer science. We are especially concerned with situations where an adversary bidder knows the bidding algorithms of all the…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
We study \emph{combinatorial procurement auctions}, where a buyer with a valuation function $v$ and budget $B$ wishes to buy a set of items. Each item $i$ has a cost $c_i$ and the buyer is interested in a set $S$ that maximizes $v(S)$…
Auto-bidding is now widely adopted as an interface between advertisers and internet advertising as it allows advertisers to specify high-level goals, such as maximizing value subject to a value-per-spend constraint. Prior research has…
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We study the price of anarchy of the generalized second-price auction where bidders are value maximizers (i.e., autobidders). We show that in general the price of anarchy can be as bad as $0$. For comparison, the price of anarchy of running…
We study the efficiency of simple combinatorial auctions for the allocation of a set of items to a set of agents, with private subadditive valuation functions and budget constraints. The class we consider includes all auctions that allocate…
Motivated by practical concerns in the online advertising industry, we study a bidder subset selection problem in single-item auctions. In this problem, a large pool of candidate bidders have independent values sampled from known prior…
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…
Auction data often contain information on only the most competitive bids as opposed to all bids. The usual measurement error approaches to unobserved heterogeneity are inapplicable due to dependence among order statistics. We bridge this…
In a single-parameter mechanism design problem, a provider is looking to sell a service to a group of potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ has a private value $v_i$ for receiving the service and a feasibility constraint restricts which sets of…
We study the problem of repeatedly auctioning off an item to one of $k$ bidders where: a) bidders have a per-round individual rationality constraint, b) bidders may leave the mechanism at any point, and c) the bidders' valuations are…
A canonical setting for non-monetary online resource allocation is one where agents compete over multiple rounds for a single item per round, with i.i.d. valuations and additive utilities across rounds. With $n$ symmetric agents, a natural…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
We study correlated equilibria and coarse equilibria of simple first-price single-item auctions in the simplest auction model of full information. Nash equilibria are known to always yield full efficiency and a revenue that is at least the…