Related papers: Distributionally Robust Optimal Auction Design und…
It is well-known that optimal (i.e., revenue-maximizing) selling mechanisms in multidimensional type spaces may involve randomization. We obtain conditions under which deterministic mechanisms are optimal for selling two identical,…
This note pursues two primary objectives. First, we analyze the outcomes of an all-pay auction within a store where buyers with and without financial constraints arrive at varying rates, and where buyer types are private information.…
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…
Inspired by Internet ad auction applications, we study the problem of allocating a single item via an auction when bidders place very different values on the item. We formulate this as the problem of prior-free auction and focus on…
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…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
Many online companies sell advertisement space in second-price auctions with reserve. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic method to learn a profitable strategy to set the reserve price. We use historical auction data with features to…
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…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
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…
Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…
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…
We study independent private values auction environments in which the auctioneer's revenue depends nonlinearly on bidders' interim winning probabilities. Our framework accommodates heterogeneity among bidders and places no ad hoc…
Since economic mechanisms are often applied to very different instances of the same problem, it is desirable to identify mechanisms that work well in a wide range of circumstances. We pursue this goal for a position auction setting and…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…
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 study the problem of designing a two-sided market (double auction) to maximize the gains from trade (social welfare) under the constraints of (dominant-strategy) incentive compatibility and budget-balance. Our goal is to do so for an…
Bid shading has become a standard practice in the digital advertising industry, in which most auctions for advertising (ad) opportunities are now of first price type. Given an ad opportunity, performing bid shading requires estimating not…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
We design a fixed-price auction mechanism for a seller to sell multiple items in a tree-structured market. The buyers have independently drawn valuation from a uniform distribution, and the seller would like to incentivize buyers to invite…