Related papers: A Note on Approximate Revenue Maximization with Tw…
In the multi-unit pricing problem, multiple units of a single item are for sale. A buyer's valuation for $n$ units of the item is $v \min \{ n, d\} $, where the per unit valuation $v$ and the capacity $d$ are private information of the…
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…
We consider the problem of maximizing the expected revenue from selling $k$ homogeneous goods to $n$ unit-demand buyers who arrive sequentially with independent and identically distributed valuations. In this setting the optimal posted…
Consider a seller that intends to auction some item. The seller can invest money and effort in advertising in different market segments in order to recruit $n$ bidders to the auction. Alternatively, the seller can have a much cheaper and…
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
We develop a general duality-theory framework for revenue maximization in additive Bayesian auctions. The framework extends linear programming duality and complementarity to constraints with partial derivatives. The dual system reveals the…
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,…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
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.…
Designing revenue optimal auctions for selling an item to $n$ symmetric bidders is a fundamental problem in mechanism design. Myerson (1981) shows that the second price auction with an appropriate reserve price is optimal when bidders'…
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…
Motivated by the recent popularity of machine learning training services, we introduce a contract design problem in which a provider sells a service that results in an outcome of uncertain quality for the buyer. The seller has a set of…
In this paper we define a new auction, called the Draw auction. It is based on the implementation of a draw when a minimum price of sale is not reached. We find that a Bayesian Nash equilibrium is reached in the Draw auction when each…
We study the problem of when to sell an indivisible object. There is a monopolistic seller who owns an indivisible object and plans to sell it over a given span of time to the set of potential buyers whose valuations for the object evolve…
Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to possess…
An unconstrained nonlinear binary optimization problem of selecting a maximum expected value subset of items is considered. Each item is associated with a profit and probability. Each of the items succeeds or fails independently with the…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
We study the envy free pricing problem faced by a seller who wishes to maximize revenue by setting prices for bundles of items. If there is an unlimited supply of items and agents are single minded then we show that finding the revenue…
We study the multi-item mechanism design problem where a monopolist sells $n$ heterogeneous items to a single buyer. We focus on buy-many mechanisms, a natural class of mechanisms frequently used in practice. The buy-many property allows…
The primary contribution of this paper resides in devising constant-factor approximation guarantees for revenue maximization in two-sided matching markets, under general pairwise rewards. A major distinction between our work and…