Related papers: Ironing in the Dark
In the current work we introduce a novel estimation of distribution algorithm to tackle a hard combinatorial optimization problem, namely the single-machine scheduling problem, with uncertain delivery times. The majority of the existing…
This paper proposes a formal approach to online learning and planning for agents operating in a priori unknown, time-varying environments. The proposed method computes the maximally likely model of the environment, given the observations…
Many applications, including natural language processing, sensor networks, collaborative filtering, and federated learning, call for estimating discrete distributions from data collected in batches, some of which may be untrustworthy,…
We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…
We propose a novel statistical learning method for multi-item auctions that incorporates credible intervals. Our approach employs nonparametric density estimation to estimate credible intervals for bidder types based on historical data. We…
In many repeated auction settings, participants care not only about how frequently they win but also how their winnings are distributed over time. This problem arises in various practical domains where avoiding congested demand is crucial,…
We propose a new architecture to approximately learn incentive compatible, revenue-maximizing auctions from sampled valuations. Our architecture uses the Sinkhorn algorithm to perform a differentiable bipartite matching which allows the…
We improve the best known competitive ratio (from 1/4 to 1/2), for the online multi-unit allocation problem, where the objective is to maximize the single-price revenue. Moreover, the competitive ratio of our algorithm tends to 1, as the…
We consider the problem of the optimization of bidding strategies in prior-dependent revenue-maximizing auctions, when the seller fixes the reserve prices based on the bid distributions. Our study is done in the setting where one bidder is…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
Bid shading has become a standard practice in the digital advertising industry, in which most auctions for advertising (ad) opportunities are now of first price type. Given an ad opportunity, performing bid shading requires estimating not…
Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…
We study individual rational, Pareto optimal, and incentive compatible mechanisms for auctions with heterogeneous items and budget limits. For multi-dimensional valuations we show that there can be no deterministic mechanism with these…
We introduce several new estimation methods that leverage shape constraints in auction models to estimate various objects of interest, including the distribution of a bidder's valuations, the bidder's ex ante expected surplus, and the…
We study the performance of anonymous posted-price selling mechanisms for a standard Bayesian auction setting, where $n$ bidders have i.i.d. valuations for a single item. We show that for the natural class of Monotone Hazard Rate (MHR)…
Auctions with partially-revealed information about items are broadly employed in real-world applications, but the underlying mechanisms have limited theoretical support. In this work, we study a machine learning formulation of these types…
We consider the problem of learning optimal reserve price in repeated auctions against non-myopic bidders, who may bid strategically in order to gain in future rounds even if the single-round auctions are truthful. Previous algorithms,…
Recent years have seen a surge of artificial currency-based mechanisms in contexts where monetary instruments are deemed unfair or inappropriate, e.g., in allocating food donations to food banks, course seats to students, and, more…
We consider the problem of an auctioneer who faces the task of selling a good (drawn from a known distribution) to a set of buyers, when the auctioneer does not have the capacity to describe to the buyers the exact identity of the good that…
Motivated by the application of real-time pricing in e-commerce platforms, we consider the problem of revenue-maximization in a setting where the seller can leverage contextual information describing the customer's history and the product's…