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The paper proposes a parsimonious and flexible semiparametric quantile regression specification for asymmetric bidders within the independent private value framework. Asymmetry is parameterized using powers of a parent private value…
We study revenue maximization in settings where agents' values are interdependent: each agent receives a signal drawn from a correlated distribution and agents' values are functions of all of the signals. We introduce a variant of the…
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…
This paper introduces the targeted sampling model in optimal auction design. In this model, the seller may specify a quantile interval and sample from a buyer's prior restricted to the interval. This can be interpreted as allowing the…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
We study risk-free bidding strategies in combinatorial auctions with incomplete information. Specifically, what is the maximum profit that a complement-free (subadditive) bidder can guarantee in a multi-item combinatorial auction? Suppose…
We propose a new architecture to approximately learn incentive compatible, revenue-maximizing auctions from sampled valuations. Our architecture uses the Sinkhorn algorithm to perform a differentiable bipartite matching which allows the…
We introduce a new numerical framework to learn optimal bidding strategies in repeated auctions when the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. Crucially, we do not assume that the bidders know what optimization mechanism is used…
This paper develops a general approach, rooted in statistical learning theory, to learning an approximately revenue-maximizing auction from data. We introduce $t$-level auctions to interpolate between simple auctions, such as welfare…
Designing an incentive compatible auction that maximizes expected revenue is an intricate task. The single-item case was resolved in a seminal piece of work by Myerson in 1981, but more than 40 years later a full analytical understanding of…
In this paper, we derive bounds for profit maximizing prior-free procurement auctions where a buyer wishes to procure multiple units of a homogeneous item from n sellers who are strategic about their per unit valuation. The buyer earns the…
We present a general framework for designing approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms for multi-item additive auctions, which applies to both truthful and non-truthful auctions. Given a (not necessarily truthful) single-item auction format…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
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…
Maximizing the revenue from selling _more than one_ good (or item) to a single buyer is a notoriously difficult problem, in stark contrast to the one-good case. For two goods, we show that simple "one-dimensional" mechanisms, such as…
We consider markets consisting of a set of indivisible items, and buyers that have {\em sharp} multi-unit demand. This means that each buyer $i$ wants a specific number $d_i$ of items; a bundle of size less than $d_i$ has no value, while a…
Problem definition: We study a data-driven pricing problem in which a seller sets a price for a single item based on demand observed at a limited number of historical prices. Our goal is to quantify the value of such information and to…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
We provide a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for the Bayesian optimal multi-item multi-bidder auction problem under two conditions. First, bidders are independent, have additive valuations and are from the same population.…
We consider the problem of designing revenue-optimal auctions for selling two items and bidders' valuations are independent among bidders but negatively correlated among items. In this paper, we obtain the closed-form optimal auction for…