Related papers: Optimal Multi-Unit Mechanisms with Private Demands
Finding the optimal (revenue-maximizing) mechanism to sell multiple items has been a prominent and notoriously difficult open problem. Existing work has mainly focused on deriving analytical results tailored to a particular class of…
A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…
We study revenue optimization pricing algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation. We show that, in the case when both the seller and the buyer…
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 optimal mechanism design for the case with one buyer and two items. The buyer's valuations towards the two items are independent and additive. In this setting, optimal mechanism is unknown for general valuation distributions. We…
We consider the Item Pricing problem for revenue maximization in the limited supply setting, where a single seller with $n$ items caters to $m$ buyers with unknown subadditive valuation functions who arrive in a sequence. The seller sets…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
We provide sufficient conditions for revenue maximization in a two-good monopoly where the buyer's values for the items come from independent (but not necessarily identical) distributions over bounded intervals. Under certain distributional…
We study the problem of a seller dynamically pricing $d$ distinct types of indivisible goods, when faced with the online arrival of unit-demand buyers drawn independently from an unknown distribution. The goods are not in limited supply,…
We consider the problem of designing an expected-revenue maximizing mechanism for allocating multiple non-perishable goods of $k$ varieties to flexible consumers over $T$ time steps. In our model, a random number of goods of each variety…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
In this paper, we present the first approximation algorithms for the problem of designing revenue optimal Bayesian incentive compatible auctions when there are multiple (heterogeneous) items and when bidders can have arbitrary demand and…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item multi-bidder auctions under the natural item-independence assumption - a classical problem in Multi-Dimensional Bayesian Mechanism Design. One of the biggest challenges in this area is developing…
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…
We study \emph{combinatorial procurement auctions}, where a buyer with a valuation function $v$ and budget $B$ wishes to buy a set of items. Each item $i$ has a cost $c_i$ and the buyer is interested in a set $S$ that maximizes $v(S)$…
We study the problem of characterizing revenue optimal auctions for single-minded buyers. Each buyer is interested only in a specific bundle of items and has a value for the same. Both his bundle and its value are his private information.…
The robust multi-product pricing problem is to determine the prices of a collection of products so as to maximize the worst-case revenue, where the worst case is taken over an uncertainty set of demand models that the firm expects could be…