Related papers: Revenue Maximization and Ex-Post Budget Constraint…
We design an expected polynomial-time, truthful-in-expectation, (1-1/e)-approximation mechanism for welfare maximization in a fundamental class of combinatorial auctions. Our results apply to bidders with valuations that are m matroid rank…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
We study approximation algorithms for revenue maximization based on static item pricing, where a seller chooses prices for various goods in the market, and then the buyers purchase utility-maximizing bundles at these given prices. We…
The framework of budget-feasible mechanism design studies procurement auctions where the auctioneer (buyer) aims to maximize his valuation function subject to a hard budget constraint. We study the problem of designing truthful mechanisms…
We present a polynomial-time algorithm that, given samples from the unknown valuation distribution of each bidder, learns an auction that approximately maximizes the auctioneer's revenue in a variety of single-parameter auction environments…
Generating good revenue is one of the most important problems in Bayesian auction design, and many (approximately) optimal dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) Bayesian mechanisms have been constructed for various auction settings.…
We consider markets consisting of a set of indivisible items, and buyers that have {\em sharp} multi-unit demand. This means that each buyer $i$ wants a specific number $d_i$ of items; a bundle of size less than $d_i$ has no value, while a…
Problem definition: We study a data-driven pricing problem in which a seller sets a price for a single item based on demand observed at a limited number of historical prices. Our goal is to quantify the value of such information and to…
In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for reducing the $k$-item $n$-bidder auction with additive valuation to $k$-item $1$-bidder auctions. This approach, called the \emph{Best-Guess} reduction, can be applied to address several…
We study fair division of indivisible goods in a single-parameter environment. In particular, we develop truthful social welfare maximizing mechanisms for fairly allocating indivisible goods. Our fairness guarantees are in terms of solution…
We consider the problem of allocating indivisible goods fairly among n agents who have additive and submodular valuations for the goods. Our fairness guarantees are in terms of the maximin share, that is defined to be the maximum value that…
In combinatorial auctions, a designer must decide how to allocate a set of indivisible items amongst a set of bidders. Each bidder has a valuation function which gives the utility they obtain from any subset of the items. Our focus is…
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…
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…
Budget Minimization is a scheduling problem with precedence constraints, i.e., a scheduling problem on a partially ordered set of jobs $(N, \unlhd)$. A job $j \in N$ is available for scheduling, if all jobs $i \in N$ with $i \unlhd j$ are…
We show that the Revenue-Optimal Deterministic Mechanism Design problem for a single additive buyer is #P-hard, even when the distributions have support size 2 for each item and, more importantly, even when the optimal solution is…
Bike sharing systems have been widely deployed around the world in recent years. A core problem in such systems is to reposition the bikes so that the distribution of bike supply is reshaped to better match the dynamic bike demand. When the…
We consider the problem of designing a revenue-maximizing auction for a single item, when the values of the bidders are drawn from a correlated distribution. We observe that there exists an algorithm that finds the optimal randomized…
Finding the optimal (revenue-maximizing) mechanism to sell multiple items has been a prominent and notoriously difficult open problem. Existing work has mainly focused on deriving analytical results tailored to a particular class of…
We obtain revenue guarantees for the simple pricing mechanism of a single posted price, in terms of a natural parameter of the distribution of buyers' valuations. Our revenue guarantee applies to the single item n buyers setting, with…