Related papers: Alea Iacta Est: Auctions, Persuasion, Interim Rule…
Auctions are key for maximizing sellers' revenue and ensuring truthful bidding among buyers. Recently, an approach known as differentiable economics based on machine learning (ML) has shown promise in learning powerful auction mechanisms…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
While machine-learning models are flourishing and transforming many aspects of everyday life, the inability of humans to understand complex models poses difficulties for these models to be fully trusted and embraced. Thus, interpretability…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
Many sequential decision-making tasks require satisfaction of multiple, partially contradictory objectives. Existing approaches are monolithic, namely all objectives are fulfilled using a single policy, which is a function that selects a…
We study the design of optimal incentives in sequential processes. To do so, we consider a basic and fundamental model in which an agent initiates a value-creating sequential process through costly investment with random success. If…
We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…
The problem of simple $M-$ary hypothesis testing under a generic performance criterion that depends on arbitrary functions of error probabilities is considered. Using results from convex analysis, it is proved that an optimal decision rule…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
We study the phenomenon of intransitivity in models of dice and voting. First, we follow a recent thread of research for $n$-sided dice with pairwise ordering induced by the probability, relative to $1/2$, that a throw from one die is…
In the buyback problem, an algorithm observes a sequence of bids and must decide whether to accept each bid at the moment it arrives, subject to some constraints on the set of accepted bids. Decisions to reject bids are irrevocable, whereas…
We consider the problem of probabilistic allocation of objects under ordinal preferences. We devise an allocation mechanism, called the vigilant eating rule (VER), that applies to nearly arbitrary feasibility constraints. It is constrained…
We consider a simple model of imprecise comparisons: there exists some $\delta>0$ such that when a subject is given two elements to compare, if the values of those elements (as perceived by the subject) differ by at least $\delta$, then the…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
Condorcet's paradox is a fundamental result in social choice theory which states that there exist elections in which, no matter which candidate wins, a majority of voters prefer a different candidate. In fact, even if we can select any $k$…
We study a version of the classical Cayley-Moser optimal stopping problem, in which a seller must sell an asset by a given deadline, with the offers, which are independent random variables with a known distribution, arriving at random…
We present a quantum auction protocol using superpositions to represent bids and distributed search to identify the winner(s). Measuring the final quantum state gives the auction outcome while simultaneously destroying the superposition.…
We consider the problem of designing revenue-optimal auctions for selling two items and bidders' valuations are independent among bidders but negatively correlated among items. In this paper, we obtain the closed-form optimal auction for…
In lowest unique bid auctions, $N$ players bid for an item. The winner is whoever places the \emph{lowest} bid, provided that it is also unique. We use a grand canonical approach to derive an analytical expression for the equilibrium…