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Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
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…
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…
In this paper, we study the non-stationary online second price auction problem. We assume that the seller is selling the same type of items in $T$ rounds by the second price auction, and she can set the reserve price in each round. In each…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…
We study the classic bilateral trade setting. Myerson and Satterthwaite show that there is no Bayesian incentive compatible and budget-balanced mechanism that obtains the gains from trade of the first-best mechanism. Consider the…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
Selling reserved instances (or virtual machines) is a basic service in cloud computing. In this paper, we consider a more flexible pricing model for instance reservation, in which a customer can propose the time length and number of…
In the context of advertising auctions, finding good reserve prices is a notoriously challenging learning problem. This is due to the heterogeneity of ad opportunity types and the non-convexity of the objective function. In this work, we…
Auto-bidding is an area of increasing importance in the domain of online advertising. We study the problem of designing auctions in an auto-bidding setting with the goal of maximizing welfare at system equilibrium. Previous results showed…
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…
We consider a dynamic mechanism design problem where an auctioneer sells an indivisible good to groups of buyers in every round, for a total of $T$ rounds. The auctioneer aims to maximize their discounted overall revenue while adhering to a…
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…
Diffusion auction design is a new trend in mechanism design for which the main goal is to incentivize existing buyers to invite new buyers, who are their neighbors on a social network, to join an auction even though they are competitors.…
I establish nonparametric identification results in first- and second-price auctions when transaction prices are truncated by a binding reserve price under a range of information structures. When the number of potential bidders is fixed and…
We study revenue maximization through sequential posted-price (SPP) mechanisms in single-dimensional settings with $n$ buyers and independent but not necessarily identical value distributions. We construct the SPP mechanisms by considering…
We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…
This paper considers prior-independent mechanism design, namely identifying a single mechanism that has near optimal performance on every prior distribution. We show that mechanisms with truthtelling equilibria, a.k.a., revelation…
Most recent papers addressing the algorithmic problem of allocating advertisement space for keywords in sponsored search auctions assume that pricing is done via a first-price auction, which does not realistically model the Generalized…