Related papers: Non-Truthful Position Auctions Are More Robust to …
We study optimal auction design in an independent private values environment where bidders can endogenously -- but at a cost -- improve information about their own valuations. The optimal mechanism is two-stage: at stage-1 bidders register…
This paper develops the theory of mechanism redesign by which an auctioneer can reoptimize an auction based on bid data collected from previous iterations of the auction on bidders from the same market. We give a direct method for…
We study the communication complexity of combinatorial auctions via interpolation mechanisms that interpolate between non-truthful and truthful protocols. Specifically, an interpolation mechanism has two phases. In the first phase, the…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
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…
In practice, auction data are often endogenously censored and anonymous, revealing only limited outcome statistics rather than full bid profiles. We study robust auction design when the seller observes only aggregated, anonymous order…
Lately, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), i.e., uniquely discernible assets on a blockchain, have skyrocketed in popularity by addressing a broad audience. However, the typical NFT auctioning procedures are conducted in various, ad hoc ways,…
Standard ad auction formats do not immediately extend to settings where multiple size configurations and layouts are available to advertisers. In these settings, the sale of web advertising space increasingly resembles a combinatorial…
We present an original theorem in auction theory: it specifies general conditions under which the sum of the payments of all bidders is necessarily not identically zero, and more generally not constant. Moreover, it explicitly supplies a…
Bidding is a key element of search advertising, but the variation in bidders' valuations and strategies is often overlooked. Disclosing bid information helps uncover this heterogeneity and enables platforms to tailor their disclosure…
This paper studies mechanism design for auctions with externalities on budgets, a novel setting where the budgets that bidders commit are adjusted due to the externality of the competitors' allocation outcomes-a departure from traditional…
We revisit the well-studied problem of designing mechanisms for one-sided matching markets, where a set of $n$ agents needs to be matched to a set of $n$ heterogeneous items. Each agent $i$ has a value $v_{i,j}$ for each item $j$, and these…
We study mechanism design when agents may have hidden secondary goals which will manifest as non-trivial preferences among outcomes for which their primary utility is the same. We show that in such cases, a mechanism is robust against…
In classic auction theory, reserve prices are known to be effective for improving revenue for the auctioneer against quasi-linear utility maximizing bidders. The introduction of reserve prices, however, usually do not help improve total…
We study the optimal behavior of a bidder in a real-time auction subject to the requirement that a specified collections of heterogeneous items be acquired within given time constraints. The problem facing this bidder is cast as a…
Many popular search engines run an auction to determine the placement of advertisements next to search results. Current auctions at Google and Yahoo! let advertisers specify a single amount as their bid in the auction. This bid is…
We study how a budget-constrained bidder should learn to adaptively bid in repeated first-price auctions to maximize her cumulative payoff. This problem arose due to an industry-wide shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions…
We consider a multi-round auction setting motivated by pay-per-click auctions for Internet advertising. In each round the auctioneer selects an advertiser and shows her ad, which is then either clicked or not. An advertiser derives value…
Sequential auctions for identical items with unit-demand, private-value buyers are common and often occur periodically without end, as new bidders replace departing ones. We model bidder uncertainty by introducing a probability that a…
Secondary spectrum auction is widely applied in wireless networks for mitigating the spectrum scarcity. In a realistic spectrum trading market, the requests from secondary users often specify the usage of a fixed spectrum frequency band in…