Related papers: How to manipulate truthful prior-dependent mechani…
Reserve prices are widely used in practice. The problem of designing revenue-optimal auctions based on reserve price has drawn much attention in the auction design community. Although they have been extensively studied, most developments…
We analyze a scenario in which software agents implemented as regret-minimizing algorithms engage in a repeated auction on behalf of their users. We study first-price and second-price auctions, as well as their generalized versions (e.g.,…
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…
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…
Designing auctions to incentivize buyers to invite new buyers via their social connections is a new trend in mechanism design. The challenge is that buyers are competitors and we need to design proper incentives for them to invite each…
We consider a variant of the standard Bayesian mechanism, where players evaluate their outcomes and constraints in an ex-ante manner. Such a model captures a major form of modern online advertising where an advertiser is concerned with…
We show that a Bayesian strategy map profile is a Bayesian Nash Equilibrium independent of any prior if and only if the Bayesian strategy map profile, evaluated at any type profile, is the Nash equilibrium of the so-called local…
Real-time bidding, as one of the most popular mechanisms for selling online ad slots, facilitates advertisers to reach their potential customers. The goal of bidding optimization is to maximize the advertisers' return on investment (ROI)…
We provide the first direct test of how the credibility of an auction format affects bidding behavior and final outcomes. To do so, we conduct a series of laboratory experiments where the role of the seller is played by a human subject who…
Mechanism design is addressed in the context of fair allocations of indivisible goods with monetary compensation. Motivated by a real-world social choice problem, mechanisms with verification are considered in a setting where (i) agents'…
In today's online advertising markets, it is common for advertisers to set long-term budgets. Correspondingly, advertising platforms adopt budget control methods to ensure that advertisers' payments lie within their budgets. Most budget…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
This paper is intended to explain, in simple terms, some of the mechanisms and agents common to multiagent financial market simulations. We first discuss the necessity to include an exogenous price time series ("the fundamental value") for…
In repeated games, such as auctions, players rely on autonomous learning agents to choose their actions. We study settings in which players have their agents make monetary transfers to other agents during play at their own expense, in order…
Contemporary real-world online ad auctions differ from canonical models [Edelman et al., 2007; Varian, 2009] in at least four ways: (1) values and click-through rates can depend upon users' search queries, but advertisers can only partially…
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.…
Although behavioral economics has demonstrated that there are many situations where rational choice is a poor empirical model, it has so far failed to provide quantitative models of economic problems such as price formation. We make a step…
We study the bilateral trade problem where a seller owns a single indivisible item, and a potential buyer seeks to purchase it. Previous mechanisms for this problem only considered the case where the values of the buyer and the seller are…
In the design and analysis of revenue-maximizing auctions, auction performance is typically measured with respect to a prior distribution over inputs. The most obvious source for such a distribution is past data. The goal is to understand…
In diffusion auctions, sellers can leverage an underlying social network to broaden participation, thereby increasing their potential revenue. Specifically, sellers can incentivise participants in their auction to diffuse information about…