Related papers: Learning Multi-item Auctions with (or without) Sam…
Motivated by stochastic optimization, we introduce the problem of learning from samples of contextual value distributions. A contextual value distribution can be understood as a family of real-valued distributions, where each sample…
In online advertising markets, budget-constrained advertisers acquire ad placements through repeated bidding in auctions on various platforms. We present a strategy for bidding optimally in a set of auctions that may or may not be…
The enhanced competition paradigm is an attempt at bridging the gap between simple and optimal auctions. In this line of work, given an auction setting with $m$ items and $n$ bidders, the goal is to find the smallest $n' \geq n$ such that…
In this paper, we analyze a natural learning algorithm for uniform pacing of advertising budgets, equipped to adapt to varying ad sale platform conditions. On the demand side, advertisers face a fundamental technical challenge in automating…
We revisit the problem of large-scale assortment optimization under the multinomial logit choice model without any assumptions on the structure of the feasible assortments. Scalable real-time assortment optimization has become essential in…
We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…
Consider Myerson's optimal auction with respect to an inaccurate prior, e.g., estimated from data, which is an underestimation of the true value distribution. Can the auctioneer expect getting at least the optimal revenue w.r.t. the…
This paper studies inference in first-price and second-price sealed-bid auctions with many bidders, using an asymptotic framework where the number of bidders increases while the number of auctions remains fixed. Our approach enables…
We study the equilibria of uniform price auctions where many asymmetric bidders have flat demands up to their respective quantity constraints. We present an iterative procedure that systematically finds an equilibrium outcome as well as an…
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…
Designing an incentive-compatible auction mechanism that maximizes the auctioneer's revenue while minimizes the bidders' ex-post regret is an important yet intricate problem in economics. Remarkable progress has been achieved through…
Contemporary real-world online ad auctions differ from canonical models [Edelman et al., 2007; Varian, 2009] in at least four ways: (1) values and click-through rates can depend upon users' search queries, but advertisers can only partially…
We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…
We initiate the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. Our surplus-equitable mechanism is…
It was recently shown in [http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.5518] that revenue optimization can be computationally efficiently reduced to welfare optimization in all multi-dimensional Bayesian auction problems with arbitrary (possibly…
We study risk-free bidding strategies in combinatorial auctions with incomplete information. Specifically, what is the maximum profit that a complement-free (subadditive) bidder can guarantee in a multi-item combinatorial auction? Suppose…
In this paper, we study the problem of estimating uniformly well the mean values of several distributions given a finite budget of samples. If the variance of the distributions were known, one could design an optimal sampling strategy by…
We consider the problem of an auctioneer who faces the task of selling a good (drawn from a known distribution) to a set of buyers, when the auctioneer does not have the capacity to describe to the buyers the exact identity of the good that…
Assortment optimization concerns the problem of selling items with fixed prices to a buyer who will purchase at most one. Typically, retailers select a subset of items, corresponding to an "assortment" of brands to carry, and make each…
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…