Related papers: Learning Simple Auctions
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…
Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic…
Finding optimal solutions for multi-unit combinatorial auctions is a hard problem and finding approximations to the optimal solution is also hard. We investigate the use of Branch-and-Bound techniques: they require both a way to bound from…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…
In display advertising, a small group of sellers and bidders face each other in up to 10 12 auctions a day. In this context, revenue maximisation via monopoly price learning is a high-value problem for sellers. By nature, these auctions are…
Motivated by stochastic optimization, we introduce the problem of learning from samples of contextual value distributions. A contextual value distribution can be understood as a family of real-valued distributions, where each sample…
We initiate the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. Our surplus-equitable mechanism is…
We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…
Given a sample of bids from independent auctions, this paper examines the question of inference on auction fundamentals (e.g. valuation distributions, welfare measures) under weak assumptions on information structure. The question is…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
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…
We study a classical Bayesian mechanism design problem where a seller is selling multiple items to multiple buyers. We consider the case where the seller has costs to produce the items, and these costs are private information to the seller.…
We address auctions in two-sided markets with budget constraints on buyers, a fundamental setting also crucial for applications such as display advertising. Our goal is to design efficient mechanisms that satisfy dominant strategy incentive…
Internet search companies sell advertisement slots based on users' search queries via an auction. While there has been a lot of attention on the auction process and its game-theoretic aspects, our focus is on the advertisers. In particular,…
Consider the problem of allocating goods to buyers through an auction. An auction is efficient if the resulting allocation maximizes total welfare, conditional on the information available. If buyers have private values, the…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
In this paper, we consider the revealed preferences problem from a learning perspective. Every day, a price vector and a budget is drawn from an unknown distribution, and a rational agent buys his most preferred bundle according to some…
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…
This paper studies the sample complexity (aka number of comparisons) bounds for the active best-$k$ items selection from pairwise comparisons. From a given set of items, the learner can make pairwise comparisons on every pair of items, and…
Traditional methods for computing equilibria in auctions become computationally intractable as auction complexity increases, particularly in multi-item and dynamic auctions. This paper introduces a self-play based reinforcement learning…