Related papers: Agent Failures in All-Pay Auctions
Understanding the convergence landscape of multi-agent learning is a fundamental problem of great practical relevance in many applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning. While it is known that learning dynamics converge to…
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…
The goal of an auction is to determine commodity prices such that all participants are perfectly happy. Such a solution is called a competitive equilibrium and does not exist in general. For this reason we are interested in solutions which…
We study the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…
In an infinitely repeated general-sum pricing game, independent reinforcement learners may exhibit collusive behavior without any communication, raising concerns about algorithmic collusion. To better understand the learning dynamics, we…
With recent development of artificial intelligence, it is more common to adopt AI agents in economic activities. This paper explores the economic actions of agents, including human agents and AI agents, in an economic game of trading…
Autonomous and learning agents increasingly participate in markets - setting prices, placing bids, ordering inventory. Such agents are not just aiming to optimize in an uncertain environment; they are making decisions in a game-theoretical…
The connection between games and no-regret algorithms has been widely studied in the literature. A fundamental result is that when all players play no-regret strategies, this produces a sequence of actions whose time-average is a…
Innovative auction methods can be exploited to increase profits, with Shubik's famous "dollar auction" perhaps being the most widely known example. Recently, some mainstream e-commerce web sites have apparently achieved the same end on a…
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…
We study multi-unit auctions in which bidders have limited knowledge of opponent strategies and values. We characterize optimal prior-free bids; these bids minimize the maximal loss in expected utility resulting from uncertainty surrounding…
We characterize the statistical properties of a large number of agents on two major online auction sites. The measurements indicate that the total number of bids placed in a single category and the number of distinct auctions frequented by…
We study the price of anarchy of mechanisms in the presence of risk-averse agents. Previous work has focused on agents with quasilinear utilities, possibly with a budget. Our model subsumes this as a special case but also captures that…
Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bids reach the seller directly. We study how this picture changes when a revenue-maximizing intermediary controls access to the seller's auction. Motivated by blockchain auctions, online…
We consider a double-auction mechanism, which was recently proposed in the context of rate allocation in mobile data-offloading markets. Network operators (users) derive benefit from offloading their traffic to third party WiFi or femtocell…
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 collusion in a second-price auction with two bidders in a dynamic environment. One bidder can make a take-it-or-leave-it collusion proposal, which consists of both an offer and a request of bribes, to the opponent. We show that…
We consider 2-player stochastic games with perfectly observed actions, and study the limit, as the discount factor goes to one, of the equilibrium payoffs set. In the usual setup where current states are observed by the players, we show…
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…
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…