Related papers: Fixed Price Approximability of the Optimal Gain Fr…
We study the problem of social welfare maximization in bilateral trade, where two agents, a buyer and a seller, trade an indivisible item. We consider arguably the simplest form of mechanisms -- the fixed-price mechanisms, where the…
We consider the bilateral trade problem, in which two agents trade a single indivisible item. It is known that the only dominant-strategy truthful mechanism is the fixed-price mechanism: given commonly known distributions of the buyer's…
We design simple mechanisms to approximate the Gains from Trade (GFT) in two-sided markets with multiple unit-supply sellers and multiple unit-demand buyers. A classical impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that even…
We continue the study of the performance for fixed-price mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem, and improve approximation ratios of welfare-optimal mechanisms in several settings. Specifically, in the case where only the buyer…
Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…
We study the two-agent single-item bilateral trade. Ideally, the trade should happen whenever the buyer's value for the item exceeds the seller's cost. However, the classical result of Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that no mechanism can…
We study bilateral trade with a broker, where a buyer and seller interact exclusively through the broker. The broker strategically maximizes her payoff through arbitrage by trading with the buyer and seller at different prices. We study…
A central challenge in mechanism design is to develop truthful trade mechanisms that maximize the expected gains-from-trade (GFT) in two-sided markets with strategic agents. As achieving the full GFT is generally impossible, much of the…
We characterise the set of dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), strongly budget balanced (SBB), and ex-post individually rational (IR) mechanisms for the multi-unit bilateral trade setting. In such a setting there is a single…
We study the classic bilateral trade setting. Myerson and Satterthwaite show that there is no Bayesian incentive compatible and budget-balanced mechanism that obtains the gains from trade of the first-best mechanism. Consider the…
Bilateral trade models the task of intermediating between two strategic agents, a seller and a buyer, willing to trade a good for which they hold private valuations. We study this problem from the perspective of a broker, in a regret…
I construct a novel random double auction as a robust bilateral trading mechanism for a profit-maximizing intermediary who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. It works as follows. The intermediary publicly commits to charging a…
We study gains from trade in multi-dimensional two-sided markets. Specifically, we focus on a setting with $n$ heterogeneous items, where each item is owned by a different seller $i$, and there is a constrained-additive buyer with…
We study how to maximize the broker's (expected) profit in a two-sided market, where she buys items from a set of sellers and resells them to a set of buyers. Each seller has a single item to sell and holds a private value on her item, and…
We consider a model of bilateral trade with private values. The value of the buyer and the cost of the seller are jointly distributed. The true joint distribution is unknown to the designer, however, the marginal distributions of the value…
We study bilateral trade between two strategic agents. The celebrated result of Myerson and Satterthwaite states that in general, no incentive-compatible, individually rational and weakly budget balanced mechanism can be efficient. I.e., no…
In online bilateral trade, a platform posts prices to incoming pairs of buyers and sellers that have private valuations for a certain good. If the price is lower than the buyers' valuation and higher than the sellers' valuation, then a…
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 seminal theorem of Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) proves that, in a game of bilateral trade between a single buyer and a single seller, no mechanism can be simultaneously individually-rational, budget-balanced, incentive-compatible and…
The seminal impossibility result of Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) states that for bilateral trade, there is no mechanism that is individually rational (IR), incentive compatible (IC), weakly budget balanced, and efficient. This has led…