Related papers: Optimal Auctions vs. Anonymous Pricing: Beyond Lin…
We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…
We study a multi-agent contracting problem where agents exert costly effort to achieve individually observable binary outcomes. While the principal can theoretically extract the full social welfare using a discriminatory contract that…
Given a set of $m$ agents and a set of $n$ items, where agent $A$ has utility $u_{A,i}$ for item $i$, our goal is to allocate items to agents to maximize fairness. Specifically, the utility of an agent is the sum of its utilities for items…
We consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not only to the…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
Motivated by the problem of market power in electricity markets, we introduced in previous works a mechanism for simplified markets of two agents with linear cost. In standard procurement auctions, the market power resulting from the…
We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…
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…
A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
Buying and selling of data online has increased substantially over the last few years. Several frameworks have already been proposed that study query pricing in theory and practice. The key guiding principle in these works is the notion of…
We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed…
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 obtain revenue guarantees for the simple pricing mechanism of a single posted price, in terms of a natural parameter of the distribution of buyers' valuations. Our revenue guarantee applies to the single item n buyers setting, with…
We consider online procurement auctions, where the agents arrive sequentially, in random order, and have private costs for their services. The buyer aims to maximize a monotone submodular value function for the subset of agents whose…
We study the problem of selling $n$ items to a single buyer with an additive valuation function. We consider the valuation of the items to be correlated, i.e., desirabilities of the buyer for the items are not drawn independently. Ideally,…
Strategic information is valuable either by remaining private (for instance if it is sensitive) or, on the other hand, by being used publicly to increase some utility. These two objectives are antagonistic and leaking this information might…
We consider a model of a data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has a private valuation of the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct…
We consider the bilateral trade problem, in which two agents trade a single indivisible item. It is known that the only dominant-strategy truthful mechanism is the fixed-price mechanism: given commonly known distributions of the buyer's…
This survey outlines a general and modular theory for proving approximation guarantees for equilibria of auctions in complex settings. This theory complements traditional economic techniques, which generally focus on exact and optimal…