Related papers: The Value of Information Concealment

For selling a single item to agents with independent but non-identically distributed values, the revenue optimal auction is complex. With respect to it, Hartline and Roughgarden (2009) showed that the approximation factor of the…

We consider a monopoly seller who optimally auctions a single object to a single potential buyer, with a known distribution of valuations. We show that a tight lower bound on the seller's expected revenue is $1/e$ times the geometric…

Auction is applied for trade with various mechanisms. A simple but practical question is which mechanism, typically first-price or second-price auctions, is preferred from the perspective of bidders or sellers. A celebrated answer is…

We study market interactions in which buyers are allowed to credibly reveal partial information about their types to the seller. Previous recent work has studied the special case of one buyer and one good, showing that such communication…

We study signaling in Bayesian ad auctions, in which bidders' valuations depend on a random, unknown state of nature. The auction mechanism has complete knowledge of the actual state of nature, and it can send signals to bidders so as to…

Sellers often prescreen potential bidders, restricting participation to a select group of capable participants. Recent advances in machine learning and generative AI make this strategy increasingly viable by enabling the cost-effective…

Sequential auctions for identical items with unit-demand, private-value buyers are common and often occur periodically without end, as new bidders replace departing ones. We model bidder uncertainty by introducing a probability that a…

We study a classical Bayesian mechanism design problem where a seller is selling multiple items to multiple buyers. We consider the case where the seller has costs to produce the items, and these costs are private information to the seller.…

We propose and study a novel mechanism design setup where each bidder holds two kinds of private information: (1) type variable, which can be misreported; (2) information variable, which the bidder may want to conceal or partially reveal,…

We study the bilateral trade problem where a seller owns a single indivisible item, and a potential buyer seeks to purchase it. Previous mechanisms for this problem only considered the case where the values of the buyer and the seller are…

A seller sells an object over time but is uncertain how the buyer learns their willingness-to-pay. We consider informational robustness under \textit{limited commitment}, where the seller offers a price \textit{each period} to maximize…

A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the…

The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…

We study the problem of repeatedly auctioning off an item to one of $k$ bidders where: a) bidders have a per-round individual rationality constraint, b) bidders may leave the mechanism at any point, and c) the bidders' valuations are…

We consider a model of a data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has a private valuation of the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct…

We study a single-buyer pricing problem with unreliable side information, motivated by the increasing use of AI-assisted decision-making and LLM-based predictions. The seller observes a private sample that may be either accurate (coinciding…

Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…

If you recommend a product to me and I buy it, how much should you be paid by the seller? And if your sole interest is to maximize the amount paid to you by the seller for a sequence of recommendations, how should you recommend optimally if…

When users lack specific knowledge of various system parameters, their uncertainty may lead them to make undesirable deviations in their decision making. To alleviate this, an informed system operator may elect to signal information to…

The information released to investors in financial markets has various forms. We refer to range information as information about the upper and lower bound which the payoff of a risky asset may reach in the future. This study develops…