Related papers: Exploiting Weak Supermodularity for Coalition-Proo…
Interdependent values make basic auction design tasks -- in particular maximizing welfare truthfully in single-item auctions -- quite challenging. Eden et al. recently established that if the bidders valuation functions are submodular over…
One of the major drawbacks of the celebrated VCG auction is its low (or zero) revenue even when the agents have high value for the goods and a {\em competitive} outcome could have generated a significant revenue. A competitive outcome is…
Consider sellers in a competitive market that use algorithms to adapt their prices from data that they collect. In such a context it is plausible that algorithms could arrive at prices that are higher than the competitive prices and this…
Combinatorial auctions (CAs) allow bidders to express complex preferences for bundles of goods being auctioned. However, the behavior of bidders under different payment rules is often unclear. In this paper, we aim to understand how core…
Sponsored search auctions constitute one of the most successful applications of microeconomic mechanisms. In mechanism design, auctions are usually designed to incentivize advertisers to bid their truthful valuations and to assure both the…
We introduce a framework for studying the effect of cooperation on the quality of outcomes in utility games. Our framework is a coalitional analog of the smoothness framework of non-cooperative games. Coalitional smoothness implies bounds…
In this work, we study spectrum auction problem where each request from secondary users has spatial, temporal, and spectral features. With the requests of secondary users and the reserve price of the primary user, our goal is to design…
Aggregators are playing an increasingly crucial role in the integration of renewable generation in power systems. However, the intermittent nature of renewable generation makes market interactions of aggregators difficult to monitor and…
Bounded rationality in mechanism design aims to ensure incentive-compatibility for agents who are cognitively limited. These agents lack the contingent reasoning skills that traditional mechanism design assumes, and depending on how these…
The classic result of Bulow and Klemperer (1996) shows that in multi-unit auctions with $m$ units and $n\geq m$ buyers whose values are sampled i.i.d. from a regular distribution, the revenue of the VCG auction with $m$ additional buyers is…
We propose a generalisation of the Weak Gravity Conjecture in the presence of scalar fields. The proposal is guided by properties of extremal black holes in ${\cal N}=2$ supergravity, but can be understood more generally in terms of…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
We consider a refinement to the notions of collusion-resistance in transaction fee mechanisms. In particular, we require that the collusion is by itself incentive-compatible and individually rational to all of its participants. We then…
The generalized second price (GSP) auction has served as the core selling mechanism for sponsored search ads for over a decade. However, recent trends expanding the set of allowed ad formats---to include a variety of sizes, decorations, and…
Given a sample of bids from independent auctions, this paper examines the question of inference on auction fundamentals (e.g. valuation distributions, welfare measures) under weak assumptions on information structure. The question is…
We address the problem of improving bidders' strategies in prior-dependent revenue-maximizing auctions and introduce a simple and generic method to design novel bidding strategies if the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. We…
Submodular optimization plays a key role in many real-world problems. In many real-world scenarios, it is also necessary to handle uncertainty, and potentially disruptive events that violate constraints in stochastic settings need to be…
We initiate the study of the social welfare loss caused by corrupt auctioneers, both in single-item and multi-unit auctions. In our model, the auctioneer may collude with the winning bidders by letting them lower their bids in exchange for…
Wind power producers can benefit from forming coalitions to participate cooperatively in electricity markets. To support such collaboration, various profit allocation rules rooted in cooperative game theory have been proposed. However,…
Demand response involves system operators using incentives to modulate electricity consumption during peak hours or when faced with an incidental supply shortage. However, system operators typically have imperfect information about their…