Related papers: Optimal Mechanism Design with Risk-loving Agents
A special case of Myerson's classic result describes the revenue-optimal equilibrium when a seller offers a single item to a buyer. We study a repeated sales extension of this model: a seller offers to sell a single fresh copy of an item to…
I study the optimal pricing process for selling a unit good to a buyer with prospect theory preferences. In the presence of probability weighting, the buyer is dynamically inconsistent and can be either sophisticated or naive about her own…
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…
In the large financial market, which is described by a model with countably many traded assets, we formulate the problem of the expected utility maximization. Assuming that the preferences of an economic agent are modeled with a stochastic…
Consider a seller that intends to auction some item. The seller can invest money and effort in advertising in different market segments in order to recruit $n$ bidders to the auction. Alternatively, the seller can have a much cheaper and…
We provide algorithms that learn simple auctions whose revenue is approximately optimal in multi-item multi-bidder settings, for a wide range of valuations including unit-demand, additive, constrained additive, XOS, and subadditive. We…
We study the problem of selling a resource through an auction mechanism. The winning buyer in turn develops this resource to generate profit. Two forms of payment are considered: charging the winning buyer a one-time payment, or an initial…
A sequence of recent studies show that even in the simple setting of a single seller and a single buyer with additive, independent valuations over $m$ items, the revenue-maximizing mechanism is prohibitively complex. This problem has been…
We study the revenue maximization problem with an imprecisely estimated distribution of a single buyer or several independent and identically distributed buyers given that this estimation is not far away from the true distribution. We use…
In modern advertising platforms, learning algorithms are deployed by budget-constrained bidders to maximize their accumulated value. These algorithms often offer classical utility guarantees like no-regret, i.e., the agent's utility is at…
We study auctions that are robust at any scale, i.e., they can be applied to sell both expensive and cheap items and achieve the best multiplicative approximations of the optimal revenue in the worst case. We show that the optimal mechanism…
Consider the seller's problem of finding optimal prices for her $n$ (divisible) goods when faced with a set of $m$ consumers, given that she can only observe their purchased bundles at posted prices, i.e., revealed preferences. We study…
We consider a dynamic mechanism design problem where an auctioneer sells an indivisible good to groups of buyers in every round, for a total of $T$ rounds. The auctioneer aims to maximize their discounted overall revenue while adhering to a…
A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…
Designing an incentive compatible auction that maximizes expected revenue is a central problem in Auction Design. While theoretical approaches to the problem have hit some limits, a recent research direction initiated by Duetting et al.…
We consider two canonical Bayesian mechanism design settings. In the single-item setting, we prove tight approximation ratio for anonymous pricing: compared with Myerson Auction, it extracts at least $\frac{1}{2.62}$-fraction of revenue;…
We provide an economic interpretation of the practice consisting in incorporating risk measures as constraints in a classic expected return maximization problem. For what we call the infimum of expectations class of risk measures, we show…
We study \emph{rental games} -- a single-parameter dynamic mechanism design problem, in which a designer rents out an indivisible asset over $n$ days. Each day, an agent arrives with a private valuation per day of rental, drawn from that…
Task allocation is a crucial process in modern systems, but it is often challenged by incomplete information about the utilities of participating agents. In this paper, we propose a new profit maximization mechanism for the task allocation…
Motivated by practical constraints in online advertising, we investigate single-parameter auction design for bidders with constraints on their Return On Investment (ROI) -- a targeted minimum ratio between the obtained value and the…