Related papers: A Simple Mechanism for a Budget-Constrained Buyer
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…
We study the problem of characterizing revenue optimal auctions for single-minded buyers. Each buyer is interested only in a specific bundle of items and has a value for the same. Both his bundle and its value are his private information.…
We study revenue maximization by deterministic mechanisms for the simplest case for which Myerson's characterization does not hold: a single seller selling two items, with independently distributed values, to a single additive buyer. We…
We consider the well known, and notoriously difficult, problem of a single revenue-maximizing seller selling two or more heterogeneous goods to a single buyer whose private values for the goods are drawn from a (possibly correlated) known…
In the multi-unit pricing problem, multiple units of a single item are for sale. A buyer's valuation for $n$ units of the item is $v \min \{ n, d\} $, where the per unit valuation $v$ and the capacity $d$ are private information of the…
We study multidimensional mechanism design in a common scenario where players have private information about their willingness to pay and their ability to pay. We provide a complete characterization of dominant-strategy incentive-compatible…
This paper considers Bayesian revenue maximization in the $k$-unit setting, where a monopolist seller has $k$ copies of an indivisible item and faces $n$ unit-demand buyers (whose value distributions can be non-identical). Four basic…
We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be…
In this paper, we present the first approximation algorithms for the problem of designing revenue optimal Bayesian incentive compatible auctions when there are multiple (heterogeneous) items and when bidders can have arbitrary demand and…
I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…
For Bayesian combinatorial auctions, we present a general framework for approximately reducing the mechanism design problem for multiple buyers to single buyer sub-problems. Our framework can be applied to any setting which roughly…
We study Bayesian mechanism design problems in settings where agents have budgets. Specifically, an agent's utility for an outcome is given by his value for the outcome minus any payment he makes to the mechanism, as long as the payment is…
Consider a monopolist selling $n$ items to an additive buyer whose item values are drawn from independent distributions $F_1,F_2,\ldots,F_n$ possibly having unbounded support. Unlike in the single-item case, it is well known that the…
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…
We study a novel class of mechanism design problems in which the outcomes are constrained by the payments. This basic class of mechanism design problems captures many common economic situations, and yet it has not been studied, to our…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…
We efficiently solve the optimal multi-dimensional mechanism design problem for independent bidders with arbitrary demand constraints when either the number of bidders is a constant or the number of items is a constant. In the first…
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…