Related papers: Fixed-price Diffusion Mechanism Design
This paper studies an online selection problem, where a seller seeks to sequentially sell multiple copies of an item to arriving buyers. We consider an adversarial setting, making no modeling assumptions about buyers' valuations for the…
The existing literature on optimal auctions focuses on optimizing the expected revenue of the seller, and is appropriate for risk-neutral sellers. In this paper, we identify good mechanisms for risk-averse sellers. As is standard in the…
A fundamental assumption in classical mechanism design is that buyers are perfect optimizers. However, in practice, buyers may be limited by their computational capabilities or a lack of information, and may not be able to perfectly…
We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…
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 investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
We consider a novel pricing and advertising framework, where a seller not only sets product price but also designs flexible 'advertising schemes' to influence customers' valuation of the product. We impose no structural restriction on the…
We study multi-product monopoly pricing where the seller jointly designs the selling mechanism and the information structure for the buyer to learn his values. Unlike the case with exogenous information, we show that when the seller…
We investigate revenue guarantees for auction mechanisms in a model where a distribution is specified for each bidder, but only some of the distributions are correct. The subset of bidders whose distribution is correctly specified…
We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…
Internet advertisers (buyers) repeatedly procure ad impressions from ad platforms (sellers) with the aim to maximize total conversion (i.e. ad value) while respecting both budget and return-on-investment (ROI) constraints for efficient…
In many applications, ads are displayed together with the prices, so as to provide a direct comparison among similar products or services. The price-displaying feature not only influences the consumers' decisions, but also affects the…
In the quest for market mechanisms that are easy to implement, yet close to optimal, few seem as viable as posted pricing. Despite the growing body of impressive results, the performance of most posted price mechanisms however, rely…
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
In this paper, we present an information propagation game on a network where the information is originated from a sponsor who is willing to pay a fixed total budget to the players who propagate the information. Our solution can be applied…
The buying and selling of information is taking place at a scale unprecedented in the history of commerce, thanks to the formation of online marketplaces for user data. Data providing agencies sell user information to advertisers to allow…
We study the optimal referral strategy of a seller and its relationship with the type of communication channels among consumers. The seller faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social…
We study mechanism design for nonexcludable and excludable binary public project problems. We aim to maximize the expected number of consumers and the expected social welfare. For the nonexcludable public project model, we identify a…
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…
We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution $D$ in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational…