Related papers: Buy-many mechanisms are not much better than item …
Multi-item revenue-optimal mechanisms are known to be extremely complex, often offering buyers randomized lotteries of goods. In the standard buy-one model, it is known that optimal mechanisms can yield revenue infinitely higher than that…
A recent line of research has established a novel desideratum for designing approximately-revenue-optimal multi-item mechanisms, namely the buy-many constraint. Under this constraint, prices for different allocations made by the mechanism…
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…
We study the multi-item mechanism design problem where a monopolist sells $n$ heterogeneous items to a single buyer. We focus on buy-many mechanisms, a natural class of mechanisms frequently used in practice. The buy-many property allows…
We show that the Revenue-Optimal Deterministic Mechanism Design problem for a single additive buyer is #P-hard, even when the distributions have support size 2 for each item and, more importantly, even when the optimal solution is…
Maximizing the revenue from selling two or more goods has been shown to require the use of $nonmonotonic$ mechanisms, where a higher-valuation buyer may pay less than a lower-valuation one. Here we show that the restriction to $monotonic$…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
We study a classic Bayesian mechanism design setting of monopoly problem for an additive buyer in the presence of budgets. In this setting a monopolist seller with $m$ heterogeneous items faces a single buyer and seeks to maximize her…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…
We consider the well known, and notoriously difficult, problem of a single revenue-maximizing seller selling two or more heterogeneous goods to a single buyer whose private values for the goods are drawn from a (possibly correlated) known…
The robust multi-product pricing problem is to determine the prices of a collection of products so as to maximize the worst-case revenue, where the worst case is taken over an uncertainty set of demand models that the firm expects could be…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
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…
When selling many goods with independent valuations, we develop a distributionally robust framework, consisting of a two-player game between seller and nature. The seller has only limited knowledge about the value distribution. The seller…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
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…
We study individual rational, Pareto optimal, and incentive compatible mechanisms for auctions with heterogeneous items and budget limits. For multi-dimensional valuations we show that there can be no deterministic mechanism with these…
A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
Finding the optimal (revenue-maximizing) mechanism to sell multiple items has been a prominent and notoriously difficult open problem. Existing work has mainly focused on deriving analytical results tailored to a particular class of…