Related papers: Ironing in the Dark
In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…
The Empirical Revenue Maximization (ERM) is one of the most important price learning algorithms in auction design: as the literature shows it can learn approximately optimal reserve prices for revenue-maximizing auctioneers in both repeated…
Many core problems in robotics can be framed as constrained optimization problems. Often on these problems, the robotic system has uncertainty, or it would be advantageous to identify multiple high quality feasible solutions. To enable…
Combinatorial auctions are formulated as frustrated lattice gases on sparse random graphs, allowing the determination of the optimal revenue by methods of statistical physics. Transitions between computationally easy and hard regimes are…
Designing an incentive compatible auction that maximizes expected revenue is a central problem in Auction Design. While theoretical approaches to the problem have hit some limits, a recent research direction initiated by Duetting et al.…
Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…
Auctions for perishable goods such as internet ad inventory need to make real-time allocation and pricing decisions as the supply of the good arrives in an online manner, without knowing the entire supply in advance. These allocation and…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
Previous works suggested the use of Branch and Bound techniques for finding the optimal allocation in (multi-unit) combinatorial auctions. They remarked that Linear Programming could provide a good upper-bound to the optimal allocation, but…
We study the sample complexity of learning revenue-optimal multi-item auctions. We obtain the first set of positive results that go beyond the standard but unrealistic setting of item-independence. In particular, we consider settings where…
This work develops algorithms for non-parametric confidence regions for samples from a univariate distribution whose support is a discrete mesh bounded on the left. We generalize the theory of Learned-Miller to preorders over the sample…
Research in explorable uncertainty addresses combinatorial optimization problems where there is partial information about the values of numeric input parameters, and exact values of these parameters can be determined by performing costly…
We consider the problem of optimal bidding for virtual trading in two-settlement electricity markets. A virtual trader aims to arbitrage on the differences between day-ahead and real-time market prices; both prices, however, are random and…
We establish nonparametric identification of auction models with continuous and nonseparable unobserved heterogeneity using three consecutive order statistics of bids. We then propose sieve maximum likelihood estimators for the joint…
Preference elicitation is a major challenge in large combinatorial auctions because the bundle space grows exponentially in the number of items. Recent work has used machine learning (ML) algorithms to identify a small set of bundles to…
We study probabilistic single-item second-price auctions where the item is characterized by a set of attributes. The auctioneer knows the actual instantiation of all the attributes, but he may choose to reveal only a subset of these…
A challenging category of robotics problems arises when sensing incurs substantial costs. This paper examines settings in which a robot wishes to limit its observations of state, for instance, motivated by specific considerations of energy…
Matching problems have been widely studied in the research community, especially Ad-Auctions with many applications ranging from network design to advertising. Following the various advancements in machine learning, one natural question is…
A natural optimization model that formulates many online resource allocation and revenue management problems is the online linear program (LP) in which the constraint matrix is revealed column by column along with the corresponding…
We resolve the complexity of revenue-optimal deterministic auctions in the unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian setting, i.e., the optimal item pricing problem, when the buyer's values for the items are independent. We show that the problem of…