Related papers: Tight Approximation Ratio of Anonymous Pricing
We study the revenue guarantees and approximability of item pricing. Recent work shows that with $n$ heterogeneous items, item-pricing guarantees an $O(\log n)$ approximation to the optimal revenue achievable by any (buy-many) mechanism,…
We study simple and approximately optimal auctions for agents with a particular form of risk-averse preferences. We show that, for symmetric agents, the optimal revenue (given a prior distribution over the agent preferences) can be…
We study the price of anarchy of the first-price auction in the autobidding world, where bidders can be either utility maximizers (i.e., traditional bidders) or value maximizers (i.e., autobidders). We show that with autobidders only, the…
Setting an effective reserve price for strategic bidders in repeated auctions is a central question in online advertising. In this paper, we investigate how to set an anonymous reserve price in repeated auctions based on historical bids in…
We consider the problem of maximizing revenue when selling 2 items to a single buyer with known valuation distributions. Hart and Nisan showed that selling each item separately using the optimal Myerson's price, gains at least half of the…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
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…
Myerson's seminal characterization of the revenue-optimal auction for a single item \cite{myerson1981optimal} remains a cornerstone of mechanism design. However, generalizing this framework to multi-item settings has proven exceptionally…
A traditionally desired goal when designing auction mechanisms is incentive compatibility, i.e., ensuring that bidders fare best by truthfully reporting their preferences. A complementary goal, which has, thus far, received significantly…
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…
Designing truthful, revenue maximizing auctions is a core problem of auction design. Multi-item settings have long been elusive. Recent work (arXiv:1706.03459) introduces effective deep learning techniques to find such auctions for the…
The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…
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 the classic setting of envy-free pricing, in which a single seller chooses prices for its many items, with the goal of maximizing revenue once the items are allocated. Despite the large body of work addressing such settings, most…
The fundamental assignment problem is in search of welfare maximization mechanisms to allocate items to agents when the private preferences over indivisible items are provided by self-interested agents. The mainstream mechanism…
The design of revenue-maximizing auctions with strong incentive guarantees is a core concern of economic theory. Computational auctions enable online advertising, sourcing, spectrum allocation, and myriad financial markets. Analytic…
We consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…
The competition complexity of an auction setting is the number of additional bidders needed such that the simple mechanism of selling items separately (with additional bidders) achieves greater revenue than the optimal but complex…
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 the design of truthful auctions for selling identical items in unlimited supply (e.g., digital goods) to n unit demand buyers. This classic problem stands out from profit-maximizing auction design literature as it requires no…