Related papers: Randomization beats Second Price as a Prior-Indepe…
We study reserve price optimization in multi-phase second price auctions, where the seller's prior actions affect the bidders' later valuations through a Markov Decision Process (MDP). Compared to the bandit setting in existing works, the…
We efficiently solve the optimal multi-dimensional mechanism design problem for independent bidders with arbitrary demand constraints when either the number of bidders is a constant or the number of items is a constant. In the first…
Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…
We perform a simulation-based analysis of keyword auctions modeled as one-shot games of incomplete information to study a series of mechanism design questions. Our first question addresses the degree to which incentive compatibility fails…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item multi-bidder auctions under the natural item-independence assumption - a classical problem in Multi-Dimensional Bayesian Mechanism Design. One of the biggest challenges in this area is developing…
We study the design of mechanisms -- e.g., auctions -- when the designer does not control information flows between mechanism participants. A mechanism equilibrium is leakage-proof if no player conditions their actions on leaked…
We consider a mechanism design setting with a single item and a single buyer who is uncertain about the value of the item. Both the buyer and the seller have a common model for the buyer's value, but the buyer discovers her true value only…
We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…
In today's online advertising markets, it is common for advertisers to set long-term budgets. Correspondingly, advertising platforms adopt budget control methods to ensure that advertisers' payments lie within their budgets. Most budget…
We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be…
We show that in the single-parameter mechanism design environment, the only non-wasteful, symmetric, incentive compatible and Sybil-proof direct mechanism is a second price auction with symmetric tie-breaking. Thus, if there is private…
The standard framework of online bidding algorithm design assumes that the seller commits himself to faithfully implementing the rules of the adopted auction. However, the seller may attempt to cheat in execution to increase his revenue if…
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…
A recent approach to automated mechanism design, differentiable economics, represents auctions by rich function approximators and optimizes their performance by gradient descent. The ideal auction architecture for differentiable economics…
We consider a fundamental problem in microeconomics: selling a single item to a number of potential buyers, whose values are drawn from known independent and regular (not necessarily identical) distributions. There are four widely-used and…
We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue,…
Motivated by large-market applications such as crowdsourcing, we revisit the problem of budget-feasible mechanism design under a "small-bidder assumption". Anari, Goel, and Nikzad (2018) gave a mechanism that has optimal competitive ratio…
We resolve the complexity of revenue-optimal deterministic auctions in the unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian setting, i.e., the optimal item pricing problem, when the buyer's values for the items are independent. We show that the problem of…
We obtain revenue guarantees for the simple pricing mechanism of a single posted price, in terms of a natural parameter of the distribution of buyers' valuations. Our revenue guarantee applies to the single item n buyers setting, with…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…