Related papers: Ironing in the Dark
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
We consider a practically motivated variant of the canonical online fair allocation problem: a decision-maker has a budget of perishable resources to allocate over a fixed number of rounds. Each round sees a random number of arrivals, and…
Small operators who take part in secondary wireless spectrum markets typically have strict budget limits. In this paper, we study the bidding problem of a budget constrained operator in repeated secondary spectrum auctions. In existing…
We study the classic single-item auction setting of Myerson, but under the assumption that the buyers' values for the item are distributed over finite supports. Using strong LP duality and polyhedral theory, we rederive various key results…
Consider the following online version of the submodular maximization problem under a matroid constraint: We are given a set of elements over which a matroid is defined. The goal is to incrementally choose a subset that remains independent…
In digital advertising, online platforms allocate ad impressions through real-time auctions, where advertisers typically rely on autobidding agents to optimize bids on their behalf. Unlike traditional auctions for physical goods, the value…
We consider the best arm identification problem in the stochastic multi-armed bandit framework where each arm has a tiny probability of realizing large rewards while with overwhelming probability the reward is zero. A key application of…
We study multi-unit auctions in which bidders have limited knowledge of opponent strategies and values. We characterize optimal prior-free bids; these bids minimize the maximal loss in expected utility resulting from uncertainty surrounding…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
In the design and analysis of revenue-maximizing auctions, auction performance is typically measured with respect to a prior distribution over inputs. The most obvious source for such a distribution is past data. The goal is to understand…
This paper develops learning-augmented algorithms for energy trading in volatile electricity markets. The basic problem is to sell (or buy) $k$ units of energy for the highest revenue (lowest cost) over uncertain time-varying prices, which…
We study mechanisms that use greedy allocation rules and pay-your-bid pricing to allocate resources subject to a matroid constraint. We show that all such mechanisms obtain a constant fraction of the optimal welfare at any equilibrium of…
Motivated by applications such as cloud computing, gig platforms, and blockchain auctions, we study optimal selling mechanisms for dynamic markets with stochastic supply and demand. In our model, buyers with private valuations and…
This work proposes a bid shading strategy for first-price auctions as a measure-valued optimization problem. We consider a standard parametric form for bid shading and formulate the problem as convex optimization over the joint distribution…
We study the problem of learning a linear model to set the reserve price in an auction, given contextual information, in order to maximize expected revenue from the seller side. First, we show that it is not possible to solve this problem…
We study a fundamental problem in optimization under uncertainty. There are $n$ boxes; each box $i$ contains a hidden reward $x_i$. Rewards are drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$. For each box $i$, we see $y_i$, an…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
This paper reexamines the classic problem of revenue maximization in single-item auctions with $n$ buyers under the lens of the robust optimization framework. The celebrated Myerson's mechanism is the format that maximizes the seller's…
We show that the multiplicative weight update method provides a simple recipe for designing and analyzing optimal Bayesian Incentive Compatible (BIC) auctions, and reduces the time complexity of the problem to pseudo-polynomial in…