Related papers: Generalizing Virtual Values to Multidimensional Au…
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…
What fraction of the potential social surplus in an environment can be extracted by a revenue-maximizing monopolist? We investigate this problem in Bayesian single-parameter environments with independent private values. The precise answer…
Maximizing the revenue from selling _more than one_ good (or item) to a single buyer is a notoriously difficult problem, in stark contrast to the one-good case. For two goods, we show that simple "one-dimensional" mechanisms, such as…
A monopolist wishes to maximize her profits by finding an optimal price policy. After she announces a menu of products and prices, each agent $x$ will choose to buy that product $y(x)$ which maximizes his own utility, if positive. The…
We investigate the power of randomness in the context of a fundamental Bayesian optimal mechanism design problem--a single seller aims to maximize expected revenue by allocating multiple kinds of resources to "unit-demand" agents with…
We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…
Deterministic auctions are attractive in practice due to their transparency, simplicity, and ease of implementation, motivating a sharper understanding of when they can attain the same outcomes as randomized mechanisms. We study…
We consider the problem of maximizing the gains from trade (GFT) in two-sided markets. The seminal impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite shows that even for bilateral trade, there is no individually rational (IR), Bayesian…
A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…
I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…
We study the limits of an information intermediary in the classical Bayesian auction, where a revenue-maximizing seller sells one item to $n$ buyers with independent private values. In addition, we have an intermediary who knows the buyers'…
A truthful mechanism for a Bayesian single-item auction results with some ex-ante revenue for the seller, and some ex-ante total surplus for the buyers. We study the Pareto frontier of the set of seller-buyers ex-ante utilities, generated…
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.…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
In this paper we consider multidimensional mechanism design problem for selling discrete substitutable items to a group of buyers. Previous work on this problem mostly focus on stochastic description of valuations used by the seller.…
This paper studies optimal auction design when valuations depend endogenously on post-auction collaboration between the seller and the winning bidder. Both parties exert non-contractible efforts after the auction, generating a double moral…
We study the optimal mechanism design problem faced by a market intermediary who makes revenue by connecting buyers and sellers. We first show that the optimal intermediation protocol has substantial structure: it is the solution to an…
We study envy-free pricing mechanisms in matching markets with $m$ items and $n$ budget constrained buyers. Each buyer is interested in a subset of the items on sale, and she appraises at some single-value every item in her preference-set.…
We consider the classical mathematical economics problem of {\em Bayesian optimal mechanism design} where a principal aims to optimize expected revenue when allocating resources to self-interested agents with preferences drawn from a known…
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…