Related papers: On the Computational Complexity of Optimal Simple …
We consider the classical mathematical economics problem of {\em Bayesian optimal mechanism design} where a principal aims to optimize expected revenue when allocating resources to self-interested agents with preferences drawn from a known…
Sequence models are a critical component of modern NLP systems, but their predictions are difficult to explain. We consider model explanations though rationales, subsets of context that can explain individual model predictions. We find…
Atomic congestion games are a classic topic in network design, routing, and algorithmic game theory, and are capable of modeling congestion and flow optimization tasks in various application areas. While both the price of anarchy for such…
The common way to optimize auction and pricing systems is to set aside a small fraction of the traffic to run experiments. This leads to the question: how can we learn the most with the smallest amount of data? For truthful auctions, this…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
This paper describes valuation-based systems for representing and solving discrete optimization problems. In valuation-based systems, we represent information in an optimization problem using variables, sample spaces of variables, a set of…
Motivated by the problem of selling large, proprietary data, we consider an information pricing problem proposed by Bergemann et al. that involves a decision-making buyer and a monopolistic seller. The seller has access to the underlying…
A patient seller aims to sell a good to an impatient buyer (i.e., one who discounts utility over time). The buyer will remain in the market for a period of time $T$, and her private value is drawn from a publicly known distribution. What is…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
The paper presents complexity results and performance guaranties for a family of approximation algorithms for an optimisation problem arising in software testing and manufacturing. The problem is formulated as a partitioning of a set where…
Situations where a group of agents come together to jointly buy a resource that they individually cannot afford to buy are commonly observed in markets. For example in the US market for radio spectrum, a recent proposal invited small firms…
We study the classic problem of dividing a collection of indivisible resources in a fair and efficient manner among a set of agents having varied preferences. Pareto optimality is a standard notion of economic efficiency, which states that…
We consider a monopolistic seller in a market that may be segmented. The surplus of each consumer in a segment depends on the price that the seller optimally charges, which depends on the set of consumers in the segment. We study which…
Quality information on online platforms is often conveyed through simple, percentile-based badges and tiers that remain stable across different market environments. Motivated by this empirical evidence, we study robust quality disclosure in…
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…
This paper considers optimization problems where the objective is the sum of a function given by an expectation and a closed convex composite function, and proposes stochastic composite proximal bundle (SCPB) methods for solving it.…
Mechanism design for one-sided markets has been investigated for several decades in economics and in computer science. More recently, there has been an increased attention on mechanisms for two-sided markets, in which buyers and sellers act…
In the Bidder Selection Problem (BSP) there is a large pool of $n$ potential advertisers competing for ad slots on the user's web page. Due to strict computational restrictions, the advertising platform can run a proper auction only for a…
Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application…
Fair division has emerged as a very hot topic in multiagent systems, and envy-freeness is among the most compelling fairness concepts. An allocation of indivisible items to agents is envy-free if no agent prefers the bundle of any other…