Related papers: Optimal Auctions with Restricted Allocations
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
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…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
We provide sufficient conditions for revenue maximization in a two-good monopoly where the buyer's values for the items come from independent (but not necessarily identical) distributions over bounded intervals. Under certain distributional…
This letter considers the design of an auction mechanism to sell the object of a seller when the buyers quantize their private value estimates regarding the object prior to communicating them to the seller. The designed auction mechanism…
Designing an incentive compatible auction that maximizes expected revenue is an intricate task. The single-item case was resolved in a seminal piece of work by Myerson in 1981, but more than 40 years later a full analytical understanding of…
We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…
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 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…
We study individual rational, Pareto optimal, and incentive compatible mechanisms for auctions with heterogeneous items and budget limits. For multi-dimensional valuations we show that there can be no deterministic mechanism with these…
We consider a dynamic mechanism design problem where an auctioneer sells an indivisible good to groups of buyers in every round, for a total of $T$ rounds. The auctioneer aims to maximize their discounted overall revenue while adhering to a…
We revisit the problem of designing the profit-maximizing single-item auction, solved by Myerson in his seminal paper for the case in which bidder valuations are independently distributed. We focus on general joint distributions, seeking…
Auctions are important mechanisms extensively implemented in various markets, e.g., search engines' keyword auctions, antique auctions, etc. Finding an optimal auction mechanism is extremely difficult due to the constraints of imperfect…
We develop a general duality-theory framework for revenue maximization in additive Bayesian auctions. The framework extends linear programming duality and complementarity to constraints with partial derivatives. The dual system reveals the…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
We consider the problem of an auctioneer who faces the task of selling a good (drawn from a known distribution) to a set of buyers, when the auctioneer does not have the capacity to describe to the buyers the exact identity of the good that…