Related papers: Best-Response Dynamics in Combinatorial Auctions w…
We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…
We study a setting where agents use no-regret learning algorithms to participate in repeated auctions. \citet{kolumbus2022auctions} showed, rather surprisingly, that when bidders participate in second-price auctions using no-regret bidding…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
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…
We consider the question of whether collusion among bidders (a "bidding ring") can be supported in equilibrium of unrepeated first-price auctions. Unlike previous work on the topic such as that by McAfee and McMillan [1992] and Marshall and…
We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this class,…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…
Large-scale online recommendation systems must facilitate the allocation of a limited number of items among competing users while learning their preferences from user feedback. As a principled way of incorporating market constraints and…
We consider a combinatorial auction setting where buyers have fractionally subadditive (XOS) valuations over the items and the seller's objective is to maximize the social welfare. A prophet inequality in this setting bounds the competitive…
We model a procurement scenario in which two \textit{imperfect} bidders act simultaneously on behalf of a single buyer, a configuration common in display advertising and referred to as \textit{side-by-side bidding} but largely unexplored in…
Consider a barter exchange problem over a finite set of agents, where each agent owns an item and is also associated with a (privately known) wish list of items belonging to the other agents. An outcome of the problem is a (re)allocation of…
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…
This paper proves that the welfare of the first price auction in Bayes-Nash equilibrium is at least a $.743$-fraction of the welfare of the optimal mechanism assuming agents' values are independently distributed. The previous best bound was…
We study the problem of learning to bid when the bidder's value is dynamic, i.e., when the current value depends on past outcomes. Specifically, we consider a bidder participating in repeated second-price auctions whose value depends on the…
In contextual dynamic pricing, a seller sequentially prices goods based on contextual information. Buyers will purchase products only if the prices are below their valuations. The goal of the seller is to design a pricing strategy that…
We study sequential procurement auctions where the sellers are provided with a ``best and final offer'' (BAFO) strategy. This strategy allows each seller $i$ to effectively ``freeze'' their price while remaining active in the auction, and…
In many applications, ads are displayed together with the prices, so as to provide a direct comparison among similar products or services. The price-displaying feature not only influences the consumers' decisions, but also affects the…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
Combinatorial contracts are emerging as a key paradigm in algorithmic contract design, paralleling the role of combinatorial auctions in algorithmic mechanism design. In this paper we study natural combinatorial contract settings involving…
Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…