Related papers: Robust Revenue Maximization Under Minimal Statisti…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
We study a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: constructing truthful mechanisms for welfare maximization in combinatorial auctions with submodular bidders. Dobzinski, Nisan, and Schapira provided the first mechanism that…
We consider the problem of designing an expected-revenue maximizing mechanism for allocating multiple non-perishable goods of $k$ varieties to flexible consumers over $T$ time steps. In our model, a random number of goods of each variety…
We consider the revenue maximization problem for an online retailer who plans to display in order a set of products differing in their prices and qualities. Consumers have attention spans, i.e., the maximum number of products they are…
We develop a general duality-theory framework for revenue maximization in additive Bayesian auctions. The framework extends linear programming duality and complementarity to constraints with partial derivatives. The dual system reveals the…
In the context of advertising auctions, finding good reserve prices is a notoriously challenging learning problem. This is due to the heterogeneity of ad opportunity types and the non-convexity of the objective function. In this work, we…
Bilateral trade models the task of intermediating between two strategic agents, a seller and a buyer, willing to trade a good for which they hold private valuations. We study this problem from the perspective of a broker, in a regret…
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…
A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…
In online combinatorial allocations/auctions, n bidders sequentially arrive, each with a combinatorial valuation (such as submodular/XOS) over subsets of m indivisible items. The aim is to immediately allocate a subset of the remaining…
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…
Motivated by online retail, we consider the problem of selling one item (e.g., an ad slot) to two non-excludable buyers (say, a merchant and a brand). This problem captures, for example, situations where a merchant and a brand cooperatively…
A seller chooses a reserve price in a second-price auction to maximize worst-case expected revenue when she knows only the mean of value distribution and an upper bound on either values themselves or variance. Values are private and iid.…
We study dynamic mechanisms for optimizing revenue in repeated auctions, that are robust to heterogeneous forward-looking and learning behavior of the buyers. Typically it is assumed that the buyers are either all myopic or are all infinite…
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…
We study the problem of computing maximin share guarantees, a recently introduced fairness notion. Given a set of $n$ agents and a set of goods, the maximin share of a single agent is the best that she can guarantee to herself, if she would…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…
Motivated by practical constraints in online advertising, we investigate single-parameter auction design for bidders with constraints on their Return On Investment (ROI) -- a targeted minimum ratio between the obtained value and the…
We compare the expected efficiency of revenue maximizing (or {\em optimal}) mechanisms with that of efficiency maximizing ones. We show that the efficiency of the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling a single item with k + log_{e/(e-1)}…