Related papers: Randomization beats Second Price as a Prior-Indepe…
It is well-known that optimal (i.e., revenue-maximizing) selling mechanisms in multidimensional type spaces may involve randomization. We obtain conditions under which deterministic mechanisms are optimal for selling two identical,…
Motivated by practical constraints in online advertising, we investigate single-parameter auction design for bidders with constraints on their Return On Investment (ROI) -- a targeted minimum ratio between the obtained value and the…
Mechanism design, a branch of economics, aims to design rules that can autonomously achieve desired outcomes in resource allocation and public decision making. The research on mechanism design using machine learning is called automated…
When bidders bid on complex objects, they might be unaware of characteristics effecting their valuations. We assume that each buyer's valuation is a sum of independent random variables, one for each characteristic. When a bidder is unaware…
This paper compares two leading approaches for robust optimization in the models of online algorithms and mechanism design. Competitive analysis compares the performance of an online algorithm to an offline benchmark in worst-case over…
Since economic mechanisms are often applied to very different instances of the same problem, it is desirable to identify mechanisms that work well in a wide range of circumstances. We pursue this goal for a position auction setting and…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
Designing an incentive compatible auction that maximizes expected revenue is an intricate task. The single-item case was resolved in a seminal piece of work by Myerson in 1981, but more than 40 years later a full analytical understanding of…
Assortment optimization concerns the problem of selling items with fixed prices to a buyer who will purchase at most one. Typically, retailers select a subset of items, corresponding to an "assortment" of brands to carry, and make each…
We study the problem of setting a price for a potential buyer with a valuation drawn from an unknown distribution $D$. The seller has "data"' about $D$ in the form of $m \ge 1$ i.i.d. samples, and the algorithmic challenge is to use these…
Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…
We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a…
We consider a robust version of the revenue maximization problem, where a single seller wishes to sell $n$ items to a single unit-demand buyer. In this robust version, the seller knows the buyer's marginal value distribution for each item…
We study online combinatorial auctions with production costs proposed by Blum et al. using the online primal dual framework. In this model, buyers arrive online, and the seller can produce multiple copies of each item subject to a…
We provide a characterization of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanisms in settings where a monopolist sells k items over k periods to a buyer who realizes his value for item i in the beginning of period i. We require that the mechanism…
We study the problem of learning to bid when the bidder's value is dynamic, i.e., when the current value depends on past outcomes. Specifically, we consider a bidder participating in repeated second-price auctions whose value depends on the…
In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for reducing the $k$-item $n$-bidder auction with additive valuation to $k$-item $1$-bidder auctions. This approach, called the \emph{Best-Guess} reduction, can be applied to address several…
The progressive second-price auction of Lazar and Semret is a decentralized mechanism for the allocation and real-time pricing of a divisible resource. Our focus is on how delays in the receipt of bid messages, asynchronous analysis by…
A central problem in Microeconomics is to design auctions with good revenue properties. In this setting, the bidders' valuations for the items are private knowledge, but they are drawn from publicly known prior distributions. The goal is to…
Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bids reach the seller directly. We study how this picture changes when a revenue-maximizing intermediary controls access to the seller's auction. Motivated by blockchain auctions, online…