Related papers: A Simple Mechanism for a Budget-Constrained Buyer
We consider the problem of maximizing revenue for a monopolist offering multiple items to multiple heterogeneous buyers. We develop a simple mechanism that obtains a constant factor approximation under the assumption that the buyers' values…
Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…
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…
In this paper we design information elicitation mechanisms for Bayesian auctions. While in Bayesian mechanism design the distributions of the players' private types are often assumed to be common knowledge, information elicitation considers…
Along with substantial progress made recently in designing near-optimal mechanisms for multi-item auctions, interesting structural questions have also been raised and studied. In particular, is it true that the seller can always extract…
We resolve the complexity of revenue-optimal deterministic auctions in the unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian setting, i.e., the optimal item pricing problem, when the buyer's values for the items are independent. We show that the problem of…
We investigate revenue guarantees for auction mechanisms in a model where a distribution is specified for each bidder, but only some of the distributions are correct. The subset of bidders whose distribution is correctly specified…
We give a detailed characterization of optimal trades under budget constraints in a prediction market with a cost-function-based automated market maker. We study how the budget constraints of individual traders affect their ability to…
Classical Bayesian mechanism design relies on the common prior assumption, but such prior is often not available in practice. We study the design of prior-independent mechanisms that relax this assumption: the seller is selling an…
We consider a robust version of the revenue maximization problem, where a single seller wishes to sell $n$ items to a single unit-demand buyer. In this robust version, the seller knows the buyer's marginal value distribution for each item…
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…
Motivated by many practical applications, in this paper we study {\em budget feasible mechanisms} where the goal is to procure independent sets from matroids. More specifically, we are given a matroid $\mathcal{M}=(E,\mathcal{I})$ where…
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 a revenue-maximizing seller with $m$ heterogeneous items and a single buyer whose valuation $v$ for the items may exhibit both substitutes (i.e., for some $S, T$, $v(S \cup T) < v(S) + v(T)$) and complements (i.e., for some $S,…
We study envy-free pricing mechanisms in matching markets with $m$ items and $n$ budget constrained buyers. Each buyer is interested in a subset of the items on sale, and she appraises at some single-value every item in her preference-set.…
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 consider a model of Bayesian observational learning in which a sequence of agents receives a private signal about an underlying binary state of the world. Each agent makes a decision based on its own signal and its observations of…
The problem of designing a profit-maximizing, Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanism with flexible consumers and costly heterogeneous supply is considered. In our setup, each consumer is associated with a…
The optimal pricing problem is a fundamental problem that arises in combinatorial auctions. Suppose that there is one seller who has indivisible items and multiple buyers who want to purchase a combination of the items. The seller wants to…
We consider budget feasible mechanisms for procurement auctions with additive valuation functions. For the divisible case, where agents can be allocated fractionally, there exists an optimal mechanism with approximation guarantee $e/(e-1)$…