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We continue the study of the performance for fixed-price mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem, and improve approximation ratios of welfare-optimal mechanisms in several settings. Specifically, in the case where only the buyer…
We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…
Standard Bayesian analyses can be difficult to perform when the full likelihood, and consequently the full posterior distribution, is too complex and difficult to specify or if robustness with respect to data or to model misspecifications…
Internet ad auctions have evolved from a few lines of text to richer informational layouts that include images, sitelinks, videos, etc. Ads in these new formats occupy varying amounts of space, and an advertiser can provide multiple…
This paper considers Bayesian revenue maximization in the $k$-unit setting, where a monopolist seller has $k$ copies of an indivisible item and faces $n$ unit-demand buyers (whose value distributions can be non-identical). Four basic…
We study revenue maximization in settings where agents' values are interdependent: each agent receives a signal drawn from a correlated distribution and agents' values are functions of all of the signals. We introduce a variant of the…
We consider the sale of a single item to multiple buyers by a revenue-maximizing seller. Recent work of Akbarpour and Li formalizes \emph{credibility} as an auction desideratum, and prove that the only optimal, credible, strategyproof…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
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…
We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue,…
We study efficiency loss in Bayesian revenue optimal auctions. We quantify this as the worst case ratio of loss in the realized social welfare to the social welfare that can be realized by an efficient auction. Our focus is on auctions with…
We study the two-agent single-item bilateral trade. Ideally, the trade should happen whenever the buyer's value for the item exceeds the seller's cost. However, the classical result of Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that no mechanism can…
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…
A common problem in Machine Learning and statistics consists in detecting whether the current sample in a stream of data belongs to the same distribution as previous ones, is an isolated outlier or inaugurates a new distribution of data. We…
We study independent private values auction environments in which the auctioneer's revenue depends nonlinearly on bidders' interim winning probabilities. Our framework accommodates heterogeneity among bidders and places no ad hoc…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
In many natural settings agents participate in multiple different auctions that are not simultaneous. In such auctions, future opportunities affect strategic considerations of the players. The goal of this paper is to develop a quantitative…
Auction is the common paradigm for resource allocation which is a fundamental problem in human society. Existing research indicates that the two primary objectives, the seller's revenue and the allocation efficiency, are generally…
Motivated by practical constraints in online advertising, we investigate single-parameter auction design for bidders with constraints on their Return On Investment (ROI) -- a targeted minimum ratio between the obtained value and the…