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Related papers: Monopoly pricing with buyer search

200 papers

When launching new products, firms face uncertainty about market reception. Online reviews provide valuable information not only to consumers but also to firms, allowing firms to adjust the product characteristics, including its selling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-24 José Correa , Mathieu Mari , Andrew Xia

We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-11-17 Aviad Rubinstein

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Jingyi Liu , Aviad Rubinstein , Ertem Nusret Tas , S. Matthew Weinberg , Qianfan Zhang

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Zhikang Fan , Weiran Shen

Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-09-23 Thomas Nedelec , Clément Calauzènes , Noureddine El Karoui , Vianney Perchet

Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Billy Jin , Thomas Kesselheim , Will Ma , Sahil Singla

A profit-maximizing monopolist curates a database for users seeking to learn a parameter. There are two user types: "Nowcasters" wish to learn the parameter's current value, while "forecasters" target its long-run value. Data storage…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-02 Kfir Eliaz , Ran Spiegler

Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2009-04-17 Patrick Briest , Shuchi Chawla , Robert Kleinberg , S. Matthew Weinberg

Internet advertisers (buyers) repeatedly procure ad impressions from ad platforms (sellers) with the aim to maximize total conversion (i.e. ad value) while respecting both budget and return-on-investment (ROI) constraints for efficient…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-08 Negin Golrezaei , Patrick Jaillet , Jason Cheuk Nam Liang , Vahab Mirrokni

A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Shuze Liu , Weiran Shen , Haifeng Xu

We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2014-12-02 Kareem Amin , Rachel Cummings , Lili Dworkin , Michael Kearns , Aaron Roth

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Yannai A. Gonczarowski , Nicole Immorlica , Yingkai Li , Brendan Lucier

We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-11-23 Gagan Aggarwal , Kshipra Bhawalkar , Guru Guruganesh , Andres Perlroth

A monopolist sells multiple goods to an uninformed buyer. The buyer chooses to learn any one-dimensional linear signal of their values for the goods, anticipating the seller's mechanism. The seller designs an optimal mechanism, anticipating…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-23 Agathe Pernoud , Frank Yang

A recent line of research has established a novel desideratum for designing approximately-revenue-optimal multi-item mechanisms, namely the buy-many constraint. Under this constraint, prices for different allocations made by the mechanism…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Shuchi Chawla , Rojin Rezvan , Yifeng Teng , Christos Tzamos

We investigate the relationship between product offerings, information dissemination, and consumer decision-making in a monopolistic screening environment in which consumers lack information about their valuation of quality-differentiated…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-13 Panagiotis Kyriazis , Edmund Lou

In this paper I investigate a Bayesian inverse problem in the specific setting of a price setting monopolist facing a randomly growing demand in multiple possibly interconnected markets. Investigating the Value of Information of a signal to…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-11-02 Stefan Behringer

We study the problem of designing posted-price mechanisms in order to sell a single unit of a single item within a finite period of time. Motivated by real-world problems, such as, e.g., long-term rental of rooms and apartments, we assume…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Giulia Romano , Gianluca Tartaglia , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

This paper studies a monopolist selling multiple goods to a consumer with one-dimensional private types. I provide a sufficient condition under which the monopolist's problem is equivalent to finding the upper envelope of the marginal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-28 Zhiming Feng

We consider optimal mechanism design for the case with one buyer and two items. The buyer's valuations towards the two items are independent and additive. In this setting, optimal mechanism is unknown for general valuation distributions. We…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-04-30 Zihe Wang , Pingzhong Tang