Related papers: Mechanism Design for Value Maximizers
Digital advertising constitutes one of the main revenue sources for online platforms. In recent years, some advertisers tend to adopt auto-bidding tools to facilitate advertising performance optimization, making the classical \emph{utility…
The paper designs revenue-maximizing auction mechanisms for agents who aim to maximize their total obtained values rather than the classical quasi-linear utilities. Several models have been proposed to capture the behaviors of such agents…
Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application…
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…
Nearly fifteen years ago, Google unveiled the generalized second price (GSP) auction. By all theoretical accounts including their own [Varian 14], this was the wrong auction --- the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) auction would have been 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 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…
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 consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
In markets such as digital advertising auctions, bidders want to maximize value rather than payoff. This is different to the utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes. We refer to…
The transition to auto-bidding in online advertising has shifted the focus of auction theory from quasi-linear utility maximization to value maximization subject to financial constraints. We study mechanism design for buyers with private…
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 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…
Exchange markets are a significant type of market economy, in which each agent holds a budget and certain (divisible) resources available for trading. Most research on equilibrium in exchange economies is based on an environment of…
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…
We consider a multi-dimensional screening problem of selling a product with multiple quality levels and design virtual value functions to derive conditions that imply optimality of only selling highest quality. A challenge of designing…
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
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…
Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…