Related papers: Optimal Deterministic Mechanisms for an Additive B…
We characterize optimal mechanisms for the multiple-good monopoly problem and provide a framework to find them. We show that a mechanism is optimal if and only if a measure $\mu$ derived from the buyer's type distribution satisfies certain…
Maximizing the revenue from selling two or more goods has been shown to require the use of $nonmonotonic$ mechanisms, where a higher-valuation buyer may pay less than a lower-valuation one. Here we show that the restriction to $monotonic$…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
Two sellers compete to sell identical products to a single buyer. Each seller chooses an arbitrary mechanism, possibly involving lotteries, to sell their product. The utility-maximizing buyer can choose to participate in one or both…
We provide a characterization of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanisms in settings where a monopolist sells k items over k periods to a buyer who realizes his value for item i in the beginning of period i. We require that the mechanism…
A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…
We provide simple and approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms in the multi-item multi-bidder settings. We unify and improve all previous results, as well as generalize the results to broader cases. In particular, we prove that the better…
We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…
We study the problem of selling $n$ items to a single buyer with an additive valuation function. We consider the valuation of the items to be correlated, i.e., desirabilities of the buyer for the items are not drawn independently. Ideally,…
In practice, auction data are often endogenously censored and anonymous, revealing only limited outcome statistics rather than full bid profiles. We study robust auction design when the seller observes only aggregated, anonymous order…
We apply marginal analysis \`a la Bulow and Roberts (1989) to characterize revenue-maximizing selling mechanisms for a multiproduct monopoly. We derive marginal revenue from price perturbations over arbitrary sets of bundles and show that…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
Multi-item mechanisms can be very complex offering many different bundles to the buyer that could even be randomized. Such complexity is thought to be necessary as the revenue gaps between randomized and deterministic mechanisms, or…
We consider a mechanism design setting with a single item and a single buyer who is uncertain about the value of the item. Both the buyer and the seller have a common model for the buyer's value, but the buyer discovers her true value only…
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 consider the problem of designing a revenue-optimal mechanism in the two-item, single-buyer, unit-demand setting when the buyer's valuations, $(z_1, z_2)$, are uniformly distributed in an arbitrary rectangle $[c,c+b_1]\times[c,c+b_2]$ in…
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 --…
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…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
We revisit the problem of designing the profit-maximizing single-item auction, solved by Myerson in his seminal paper for the case in which bidder valuations are independently distributed. We focus on general joint distributions, seeking…