Related papers: Optimal Auctions vs. Anonymous Pricing: Beyond Lin…
Two sellers compete to sell identical products to a single buyer. Each seller chooses an arbitrary mechanism, possibly involving lotteries, to sell their product. The utility-maximizing buyer can choose to participate in one or both…
A recent line of work in mechanism design has focused on guaranteeing incentive compatibility for agents without contingent reasoning skills: obviously strategyproof mechanisms guarantee that it is "obvious" for these imperfectly rational…
The design of data markets has gained importance as firms increasingly use machine learning models fueled by externally acquired training data. A key consideration is the externalities firms face when data, though inherently freely…
We study the two-agent single-item bilateral trade. Ideally, the trade should happen whenever the buyer's value for the item exceeds the seller's cost. However, the classical result of Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that no mechanism can…
We present a general framework for proving polynomial sample complexity bounds for the problem of learning from samples the best auction in a class of "simple" auctions. Our framework captures all of the most prominent examples of "simple"…
The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…
Auctions via social network, pioneered by Li et al. (2017), have been attracting considerable attention in the literature of mechanism design for auctions. However, no known mechanism has satisfied strategy-proofness, non-deficit,…
We continue the study of the performance for fixed-price mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem, and improve approximation ratios of welfare-optimal mechanisms in several settings. Specifically, in the case where only the buyer…
We consider a scenario in which a database stores sensitive data of users and an analyst wants to estimate statistics of the data. The users may suffer a cost when their data are used in which case they should be compensated. The analyst…
This paper studies a joint design problem where a seller can design both the signal structures for the agents to learn their values, and the allocation and payment rules for selling the item. In his seminal work, Myerson (1981) shows how to…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
Large scale multiagent systems must rely on distributed decision making, as centralized coordination is either impractical or impossible. Recent works approach this problem under a game theoretic lens, whereby utility functions are assigned…
In this paper, we study sequential auctions with two budget constrained bidders and any number of identical items. All prior results on such auctions consider only two items. We construct a canonical outcome of the auction that is the only…
We consider dynamic pricing schemes in online settings where selfish agents generate online events. Previous work on online mechanisms has dealt almost entirely with the goal of maximizing social welfare or revenue in an auction settings.…
We study the problem of selling identical goods to n unit-demand bidders in a setting in which the total supply of goods is unknown to the mechanism. Items arrive dynamically, and the seller must make the allocation and payment decisions…
In the multi-unit pricing problem, multiple units of a single item are for sale. A buyer's valuation for $n$ units of the item is $v \min \{ n, d\} $, where the per unit valuation $v$ and the capacity $d$ are private information of the…
We study the efficiency of simple auctions in the presence of complements. [DMSW15] introduced the single-bid auction, and showed that it has a price of anarchy (PoA) of $O(\log m)$ for complement-free (i.e., subadditive) valuations. Prior…
In this paper, we study decentralized decision-making where agents optimize private objectives under incomplete information and imperfect public monitoring, in a non-cooperative setting. By shaping utilities-embedding shadow prices or…
The design of privacy mechanisms for two scenarios is studied where the private data is hidden or observable. In the first scenario, an agent observes useful data $Y$, which is correlated with private data $X$, and wants to disclose the…
There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by…