Related papers: Revenue Maximization with Imprecise Distribution
We study the problem of setting a price for a potential buyer with a valuation drawn from an unknown distribution $D$. The seller has "data"' about $D$ in the form of $m \ge 1$ i.i.d. samples, and the algorithmic challenge is to use these…
This paper develops the theory of mechanism redesign by which an auctioneer can reoptimize an auction based on bid data collected from previous iterations of the auction on bidders from the same market. We give a direct method for…
Time or money? That is a question! In this paper, we consider this dilemma in the pricing regime, in which we try to find the optimal pricing scheme for identical items with heterogenous time-sensitive buyers. We characterize the…
We study the identification and estimation of first-price auction models where bidders have ambiguity about the valuation distribution and their preferences are represented by maxmin expected utility. When entry is exogenous, 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…
Finding the optimal assignment in budget-constrained auctions is a combinatorial optimization problem with many important applications, a notable example being the sale of advertisement space by search engines (in this context the problem…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
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 apply Reinforcement Learning algorithms to solve the classic quantitative finance Market Making problem, in which an agent provides liquidity to the market by placing buy and sell orders while maximizing a utility function. The optimal…
We study the optimal pricing strategies of a monopolist selling a divisible good (service) to consumers that are embedded in a social network. A key feature of our model is that consumers experience a (positive) local network effect. In…
Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic…
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…
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…
We provide a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for the Bayesian optimal multi-item multi-bidder auction problem under two conditions. First, bidders are independent, have additive valuations and are from the same population.…
We study an optimal control problem in which both the objective function and the dynamic constraint contain an uncertain parameter. Since the distribution of this uncertain parameter is not exactly known, the objective function is taken as…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
The maximin share (MMS) guarantee is a desirable fairness notion for allocating indivisible goods. While MMS allocations do not always exist, several approximation techniques have been developed to ensure that all agents receive a fraction…
This paper focuses on the problem of finding a particular data recommendation strategy based on the user preferences and a system expected revenue. To this end, we formulate this problem as an optimization by designing the recommendation…
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…
In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…