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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…
In combinatorial auctions, a designer must decide how to allocate a set of indivisible items amongst a set of bidders. Each bidder has a valuation function which gives the utility they obtain from any subset of the items. Our focus is…
For a $\{0,1\}$-valued matrix $M$ let $\rm{CC}(M)$ denote the deterministic communication complexity of the boolean function associated with $M$. The log-rank conjecture of Lov\'{a}sz and Saks [FOCS 1988] states that $\rm{CC}(M) \leq…
In this paper, we show a tight approximation guarantee for budget-feasible mechanisms with an additive buyer. We propose a new simple randomized mechanism with approximation ratio of $2$, improving the previous best known result of $3$. Our…
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 online combinatorial auctions with production costs proposed by Blum et al. using the online primal dual framework. In this model, buyers arrive online, and the seller can produce multiple copies of each item subject to a…
We prove a near optimal round-communication tradeoff for the two-party quantum communication complexity of disjointness. For protocols with $r$ rounds, we prove a lower bound of $\tilde{\Omega}(n/r + r)$ on the communication required for…
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 a class of manipulations in combinatorial auctions where bidders fundamentally misrepresent what goods they are interested in. Prior work has largely assumed that bidders only submit bids on their bundles of interest, which we call…
We study the necessity of interaction between individuals for obtaining approximately efficient allocations. The role of interaction in markets has received significant attention in economic thinking, e.g. in Hayek's 1945 classic paper. We…
Communication complexity is a fundamental aspect of information science, concerned with the amount of communication required to solve a problem distributed among multiple parties. The standard quantification of one-way communication…
In this note we study the greedy algorithm for combinatorial auctions with submodular bidders. It is well known that this algorithm provides an approximation ratio of $2$ for every order of the items. We show that if the valuations are…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
In this work, we study spectrum auction problem where each request from secondary users has spatial, temporal, and spectral features. With the requests of secondary users and the reserve price of the primary user, our goal is to design…
We model a procurement scenario in which two \textit{imperfect} bidders act simultaneously on behalf of a single buyer, a configuration common in display advertising and referred to as \textit{side-by-side bidding} but largely unexplored in…
We study the communication complexity and streaming complexity of approximating unweighted semi-matchings. A semi-matching in a bipartite graph G = (A, B, E), with n = |A|, is a subset of edges S that matches all A vertices to B vertices…
We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this class,…
In markets such as digital advertising auctions, bidders want to maximize value rather than payoff. This is different to the utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes. We refer to…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…