Related papers: Optimal Deterministic Mechanisms for an Additive B…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…
We consider a social planner faced with a stream of myopic selfish agents. The goal of the social planner is to maximize the social welfare, however, it is limited to using only information asymmetry (regarding previous outcomes) and cannot…
Myerson derived a simple and elegant solution to the single-parameter revenue-maximization problem in his seminal work on optimal auction design assuming the usual model of quasi-linear utilities. In this paper, we consider a slight…
We study the bilateral trade problem where a seller owns a single indivisible item, and a potential buyer seeks to purchase it. Previous mechanisms for this problem only considered the case where the values of the buyer and the seller are…
We study revenue maximization through sequential posted-price (SPP) mechanisms in single-dimensional settings with $n$ buyers and independent but not necessarily identical value distributions. We construct the SPP mechanisms by considering…
We consider the problem of posting prices for unit-demand buyers if all $n$ buyers have identically distributed valuations drawn from a distribution with monotone hazard rate. We show that even with multiple items asymptotically optimal…
We consider the problem of repeatedly auctioning a single item to multiple i.i.d buyers who each use a no-regret learning algorithm to bid over time. In particular, we study the seller's optimal revenue, if they know that the buyers are…
This paper studies mechanism design environments in which the designer does not know the distribution of agents' private information a priori and instead learns from agents' behavior induced by the mechanism itself. We formalize a notion of…
We show that in the single-parameter mechanism design environment, the only non-wasteful, symmetric, incentive compatible and Sybil-proof direct mechanism is a second price auction with symmetric tie-breaking. Thus, if there is private…
We consider the problem of designing a revenue-maximizing auction for a single item, when the values of the bidders are drawn from a correlated distribution. We observe that there exists an algorithm that finds the optimal randomized…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item auctions, where bidders have subadditive valuations over independent items. Providing a simple mechanism that is approximately revenue-optimal in this setting is a major open problem in mechanism…
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…
A patient seller aims to sell a good to an impatient buyer (i.e., one who discounts utility over time). The buyer will remain in the market for a period of time $T$, and her private value is drawn from a publicly known distribution. What is…
We study the optimal pricing strategy of a monopolist selling homogeneous goods to customers over multiple periods. The customers choose their time of purchase to maximize their payoff that depends on their valuation of the product, the…
In this paper, we study online double auctions, where multiple sellers and multiple buyers arrive and depart dynamically to exchange one commodity. We show that there is no deterministic online double auction that is truthful and…
We consider a model of a data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has a private valuation of the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct…
Submodular maximization is one of the central topics in combinatorial optimization. It has found numerous applications in the real world. In the past decades, a series of algorithms have been proposed for this problem. However, most of the…
We revisit the problem of designing optimal, individually rational matching mechanisms (in a general sense, allowing for cycles in directed graphs), where each player --- who is associated with a subset of vertices --- matches as many of…
We study the efficiency (in terms of social welfare) of truthful and symmetric mechanisms in one-sided matching problems with {\em dichotomous preferences} and {\em normalized von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences}. We are particularly…
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…