Related papers: Optimal Auction Design for Flexible Consumers
In this paper we formulate a contract design problem where a primary license holder wishes to profit from its excess spectrum capacity by selling it to potential secondary users/buyers. It needs to determine how to optimally price the…
We study the design of an auction for an income-generating asset such as an intellectual property license. Each bidder has a signal about his future income from acquiring the asset. After the asset is allocated, the winner's income from the…
Motivated by the dynamic assortment offerings and item pricings occurring in e-commerce, we study a general problem of allocating finite inventories to heterogeneous customers arriving sequentially. We analyze this problem under the…
In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product,…
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…
We develop a simple framework to analyze how targeted persuasive advertising shapes market power and welfare. A designer flexibly manipulates the demand curve by influencing individual valuations at a cost. A monopolist prices against this…
Diffusion auction is a new model in auction design. It can incentivize the buyers who have already joined in the auction to further diffuse the sale information to others via social relations, whereby both the seller's revenue and the…
Diffusion auction design for combinatorial settings is a long-standing challenge. One difficulty is that we cannot directly extend the solutions for simpler settings to combinatorial settings (like extending the Vickrey auction to VCG in…
From social networks to supply chains, more and more aspects of how humans, firms and organizations interact is mediated by artificial learning agents. As the influence of machine learning systems grows, it is paramount that we study how to…
The auction theory literature has so far focused mostly on the design of mechanisms that takes the revenue or the efficiency as a yardstick. However, scenarios where the {\it capacity}, which we define as \textit{``the number of bidders the…
We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about 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…
Single-shot auctions are commonly used as a means to sell goods, for example when selling ad space or allocating radio frequencies, however devising mechanisms for auctions with multiple bidders and multiple items can be complicated. It has…
We consider a generalization of the $k$-flow set system auction where the set to be procured by a customer corresponds to a feasible solution to a linear programming problem where the coefficient matrix and right-hand-side together…
We consider a seller faced with buyers which have the ability to delay their decision, which we call patience. Each buyer's type is composed of value and patience, and it is sampled i.i.d. from a distribution. The seller, using posted…
We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices,…
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 a stylized dynamic assortment planning problem during a selling season of finite length $T$. At each time period, the seller offers an arriving customer an assortment of substitutable products and the customer makes the purchase…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
Large electricity customers (e.g., large data centers) can exhibit huge and variable electricity demands, which poses significant challenges for the electricity suppliers to plan for sufficient capacity. Thus, it is desirable to design…