Related papers: Simple Mechanisms for Profit Maximization in Multi…
Maximizing the revenue from selling _more than one_ good (or item) to a single buyer is a notoriously difficult problem, in stark contrast to the one-good case. For two goods, we show that simple "one-dimensional" mechanisms, such as…
We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be…
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…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
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.…
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 consider the problem of maximizing revenue for a monopolist offering multiple items to multiple heterogeneous buyers. We develop a simple mechanism that obtains a constant factor approximation under the assumption that the buyers' values…
We study revenue optimization pricing algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation. We show that, in the case when both the seller and the buyer…
We consider the sample complexity of revenue maximization for multiple bidders in unrestricted multi-dimensional settings. Specifically, we study the standard model of $n$ additive bidders whose values for $m$ heterogeneous items are drawn…
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…
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…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item multi-bidder auctions under the natural item-independence assumption - a classical problem in Multi-Dimensional Bayesian Mechanism Design. One of the biggest challenges in this area is developing…
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…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
Generating good revenue is one of the most important problems in Bayesian auction design, and many (approximately) optimal dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) Bayesian mechanisms have been constructed for various auction settings.…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…
We consider the problem of maximizing revenue when selling 2 items to a single buyer with known valuation distributions. Hart and Nisan showed that selling each item separately using the optimal Myerson's price, gains at least half of the…
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…
We efficiently solve the optimal multi-dimensional mechanism design problem for independent bidders with arbitrary demand constraints when either the number of bidders is a constant or the number of items is a constant. In the first…