Related papers: Distributionally Robust Optimal Auction Design und…
Small operators who take part in secondary wireless spectrum markets typically have strict budget limits. In this paper, we study the bidding problem of a budget constrained operator in repeated secondary spectrum auctions. In existing…
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…
High-stakes auctions are often preceded by nonbinding communication between bidders and the seller. Motivated by these practices, this paper examines a two-period model in which two bidders send private cheap talk messages to the seller…
We study risk-free bidding strategies in combinatorial auctions with incomplete information. Specifically, what is the maximum profit that a complement-free (subadditive) bidder can guarantee in a multi-item combinatorial auction? Suppose…
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 study the problem of characterizing revenue optimal auctions for single-minded buyers. Each buyer is interested only in a specific bundle of items and has a value for the same. Both his bundle and its value are his private information.…
This paper reexamines the classic problem of revenue maximization in single-item auctions with $n$ buyers under the lens of the robust optimization framework. The celebrated Myerson's mechanism is the format that maximizes the seller's…
We model a procurement scenario in which two \textit{imperfect} bidders act simultaneously on behalf of a single buyer, a configuration common in display advertising and referred to as \textit{side-by-side bidding} but largely unexplored in…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
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…
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…
Reserve prices are widely used in practice. The problem of designing revenue-optimal auctions based on reserve price has drawn much attention in the auction design community. Although they have been extensively studied, most developments…
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…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue,…
Second-price auctions with reserve play a critical role for modern search engine and popular online sites since the revenue of these companies often directly de- pends on the outcome of such auctions. The choice of the reserve price is the…
We introduce a new numerical framework to learn optimal bidding strategies in repeated auctions when the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. Crucially, we do not assume that the bidders know what optimization mechanism is used…
We study the identification and estimation of first-price auction models where bidders have ambiguity about the valuation distribution and their preferences are represented by maxmin expected utility. When entry is exogenous, the…
Over the past few years, more and more Internet advertisers have started using automated bidding for optimizing their advertising campaigns. Such advertisers have an optimization goal (e.g. to maximize conversions), and some constraints…