Related papers: How to manipulate truthful prior-dependent mechani…
This paper studies mechanism design environments in which the designer does not know the distribution of agents' private information a priori and instead learns from agents' behavior induced by the mechanism itself. We formalize a notion of…
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…
High-stakes auctions are often preceded by nonbinding communication between bidders and the seller. Motivated by these practices, this paper examines a two-period model in which two bidders send private cheap talk messages to the seller…
We consider an auction of identical digital goods to customers whose valuations are drawn independently from known distributions. Myerson's classic result identifies the truthful mechanism that maximizes the seller's expected profit. Under…
Auctions in which agents' payoffs are random variables have received increased attention in recent years. In particular, recent work in algorithmic mechanism design has produced mechanisms employing internal randomization, partly in…
We consider auction environments in which at the time of the auction bidders observe signals about their ex-post value. We introduce a model of novice bidders who do not know know the joint distribution of signals and instead build a…
Auction design for the modern advertising market has gained significant prominence in the field of game theory. With the recent rise of auto-bidding tools, an increasing number of advertisers in the market are utilizing these tools for…
Inspired by Internet ad auction applications, we study the problem of allocating a single item via an auction when bidders place very different values on the item. We formulate this as the problem of prior-free auction and focus on…
Models of auctions or tendering processes are introduced. In every round of bidding the players select their bid from a probability distribution and whenever a bid is unsuccessful, it is discarded and replaced. For simple models, the…
We perform a simulation-based analysis of keyword auctions modeled as one-shot games of incomplete information to study a series of mechanism design questions. Our first question addresses the degree to which incentive compatibility fails…
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this…
While auction theory views bids and valuations as continuous variables, real-world auctions are necessarily discrete. In this paper, we use a combination of analytical and computational methods to investigate whether incorporating…
One of the most celebrated results in mechanism design is Myerson's characterization of the revenue optimal auction for selling a single item. However, this result relies heavily on the assumption that buyers are indifferent to risk. In…
In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…
We study the design of mechanisms -- e.g., auctions -- when the designer does not control information flows between mechanism participants. A mechanism equilibrium is leakage-proof if no player conditions their actions on leaked…
The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…
Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to possess…
Auctions are modeled as Bayesian games with continuous type and action spaces. Determining equilibria in auction games is computationally hard in general and no exact solution theory is known. We introduce an algorithmic framework in which…
Game theory has been developed by scientists as a theory of strategic interaction among players who are supposed to be perfectly rational. These strategic interactions might have been presented in an auction, a business negotiation, a chess…
We study incentive design when multiple principals simultaneously design mechanisms for their respective teams in environments with strategic spillovers. In this environment, each principal's set of incentive-compatible mechanisms--those…