Related papers: The Value of Information Concealment
A seller posts a price for a single object. The seller's and buyer's values may be interdependent. We characterize the set of payoff vectors across all information structures. Simple feasibility and individual-rationality constraints…
We consider the problem of maximizing revenue when selling 2 items to a single buyer with known valuation distributions. Hart and Nisan showed that selling each item separately using the optimal Myerson's price, gains at least half of the…
Two agents trade an item in a simultaneous offer setting, where the exchange takes place if and only if the buyer's bid price weakly exceeds the seller's ask price. Each agent is randomly assigned the buyer or seller role. Both agents are…
We obtain revenue guarantees for the simple pricing mechanism of a single posted price, in terms of a natural parameter of the distribution of buyers' valuations. Our revenue guarantee applies to the single item n buyers setting, with…
We study the revenue comparison problem of auctions when the seller has a maxmin expected utility preference. The seller holds a set of priors around some reference belief, interpreted as an approximating model of the true probability law…
Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…
Single-shot auctions are commonly used as a means to sell goods, for example when selling ad space or allocating radio frequencies, however devising mechanisms for auctions with multiple bidders and multiple items can be complicated. It has…
We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue,…
We consider two canonical Bayesian mechanism design settings. In the single-item setting, we prove tight approximation ratio for anonymous pricing: compared with Myerson Auction, it extracts at least $\frac{1}{2.62}$-fraction of revenue;…
We study an information theoretic privacy mechanism design problem for two scenarios where the private data is either observable or hidden. In each scenario, we first consider bounded mutual information as privacy leakage criterion, then we…
Consider a market where a seller owns an item for sale and a buyer wants to purchase it. Each player has private information, known as their type. It can be costly and difficult for the players to reach an agreement through direct…
Along with substantial progress made recently in designing near-optimal mechanisms for multi-item auctions, interesting structural questions have also been raised and studied. In particular, is it true that the seller can always extract…
We show that under mild assumptions, the total value of information to informed traders in the market can be measured by the covariance between price changes and order flow. This covariance captures noise trader losses, which equal informed…
Strategic information is valuable either by remaining private (for instance if it is sensitive) or, on the other hand, by being used publicly to increase some utility. These two objectives are antagonistic and leaking this information might…
A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…
Data buyers compete in a game of incomplete information about which a single data seller owns some payoff-relevant information. The seller faces a joint information- and mechanism-design problem: deciding which information to sell, while…
We consider a Bayesian persuasion problem where the persuader and the decision maker communicate through an imperfect channel that has a fixed and limited number of messages and is subject to exogenous noise. We provide an upper bound on…
We initiate the study of markets for private data, though the lens of differential privacy. Although the purchase and sale of private data has already begun on a large scale, a theory of privacy as a commodity is missing. In this paper, we…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…