Related papers: Is Collusion-Proof Procurement Expensive?
Supply Chain Management often requires independent organizations to work together to achieve shared objectives. This collaboration is necessary when coordinated actions benefit the group more than the uncoordinated efforts of individual…
We study the design of an auction for an income-generating asset such as an intellectual property license. Each bidder has a signal about his future income from acquiring the asset. After the asset is allocated, the winner's income from the…
Flaws of a continuous limit order book mechanism raise the question of whether a continuous trading session and a periodic auction session would bring better efficiency. This paper wants to go further in designing a periodic auction when…
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…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
In this paper, we study behavior of bidders in an experimental launch of a new advertising auction platform by Zillow, as Zillow switched from negotiated contracts to using auctions in several geographically isolated markets. A unique…
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 quantify the value of the monopoly's bargaining power in terms of competition complexity--that is, the number of additional bidders the monopoly must attract in simple auctions to match the expected revenue of the optimal mechanisms…
We propose a fresh `meta-game' perspective on the problem of algorithmic collusion in pricing games a la Bertrand. Economists have interpreted the fact that algorithms can learn to price collusively as tacit collusion. We argue instead that…
Online rating systems are subject to malicious behaviors mainly by posting unfair rating scores. Users may try to individually or collaboratively promote or demote a product. Collaborating unfair rating 'collusion' is more damaging than…
We study the design of iterative combinatorial auctions (ICAs). The main challenge in this domain is that the bundle space grows exponentially in the number of items. To address this, recent work has proposed machine learning (ML)-based…
Algorithmic agents are used in a variety of competitive decision-making settings, including pricing contexts that range from online retail to residential home rental. We study the emergence of algorithmic collusion when competing agents…
I show that firms price almost competitively and consumers can infer product quality from prices in markets where firms differ in quality and production cost, and learning prices is costly. Bankruptcy risk or regulation links higher quality…
In recent years, the analysis of economic crime and corruption in procurement has benefited from integrative studies that acknowledge the interconnected nature of the procurement ecosystem. Following this line of research, we present a…
Algorithmic pricing is increasingly shaping market competition, raising concerns about its potential to compromise competitive dynamics. While prior work has shown that reinforcement learning (RL)-based pricing algorithms can lead to tacit…
Core-selecting combinatorial auctions are popular auction designs that constrain prices to eliminate the incentive for any group of bidders -- with the seller -- to renegotiate for a better deal. They help overcome the low-revenue issues of…
The Competition Complexity of an auction measures how much competition is needed for the revenue of a simple auction to surpass the optimal revenue. A classic result from auction theory by Bulow and Klemperer [9], states that the…
A standard result from auction theory is that bidding truthfully in a second price auction is a weakly dominant strategy. The result, however, does not apply in the presence of Cost Per Action (CPA) constraints. Such constraints exist, for…
Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to possess…
From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to…