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Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
In this paper, we present the first approximation algorithms for the problem of designing revenue optimal Bayesian incentive compatible auctions when there are multiple (heterogeneous) items and when bidders can have arbitrary demand and…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
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…
We study the optimal behavior of a bidder in a real-time auction subject to the requirement that a specified collections of heterogeneous items be acquired within given time constraints. The problem facing this bidder is cast as a…
We examine ``tournament'' second-price auctions in which $N$ bidders compete for the right to participate in a second stage and contend against bidder $N+1$. When the first $N$ bidders are committed so that their bids cannot be changed in…
We propose a simple randomized rule for the optimization of prices in revenue management with contextual information. It is known that the certainty equivalent pricing rule, albeit popular, is sub-optimal. We show that, by allowing a small…
We consider a dynamic pricing problem for repeated contextual second-price auctions with multiple strategic buyers who aim to maximize their long-term time discounted utility. The seller has limited information on buyers' overall demand…
Sellers often prescreen potential bidders, restricting participation to a select group of capable participants. Recent advances in machine learning and generative AI make this strategy increasingly viable by enabling the cost-effective…
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…
We study the two-agent single-item bilateral trade. Ideally, the trade should happen whenever the buyer's value for the item exceeds the seller's cost. However, the classical result of Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that no mechanism can…
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…
Aiming to overcome some of the limitations of worst-case analysis, the recently proposed framework of "algorithms with predictions" allows algorithms to be augmented with a (possibly erroneous) machine-learned prediction that they can use…
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…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
In the standard formulation of mechanism design, a key assumption is that the designer has reliable information and technology to determine a prior distribution on types of the agents. In the meanwhile, as pointed out by the Wilson's…
We study a repeated trading problem in which a mechanism designer facilitates trade between a single seller and multiple buyers. Our model generalizes the classic bilateral trade setting to a multi-buyer environment. Specifically, the…
We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution $D$ in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational…
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…