Related papers: Optimal Mechanism Design for Single-Minded Agents
We study the multi-item mechanism design problem where a monopolist sells $n$ heterogeneous items to a single buyer. We focus on buy-many mechanisms, a natural class of mechanisms frequently used in practice. The buy-many property allows…
We consider a mechanism design setting with a single item and a single buyer who is uncertain about the value of the item. Both the buyer and the seller have a common model for the buyer's value, but the buyer discovers her true value only…
We introduce locality: a new property of multi-bidder auctions that formally separates the simplicity of optimal single-dimensional multi-bidder auctions from the complexity of optimal multi-dimensional multi-bidder auctions. Specifically,…
We show that the Revenue-Optimal Deterministic Mechanism Design problem for a single additive buyer is #P-hard, even when the distributions have support size 2 for each item and, more importantly, even when the optimal solution is…
Consider a monopolist selling $n$ items to an additive buyer whose item values are drawn from independent distributions $F_1,F_2,\ldots,F_n$ possibly having unbounded support. Unlike in the single-item case, it is well known that the…
We consider the classical mathematical economics problem of {\em Bayesian optimal mechanism design} where a principal aims to optimize expected revenue when allocating resources to self-interested agents with preferences drawn from a known…
We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…
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 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…
Myerson's seminal characterization of the revenue-optimal auction for a single item \cite{myerson1981optimal} remains a cornerstone of mechanism design. However, generalizing this framework to multi-item settings has proven exceptionally…
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…
The problem of designing a profit-maximizing, Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanism with flexible consumers and costly heterogeneous supply is considered. In our setup, each consumer is associated with a…
In budget-feasible mechanism design, a buyer wishes to procure a set of items of maximum value from self-interested players. We have a valuation function $v:2^U \to \mathbb{R}_+$, where $U$ is the set of all items, where $v(S)$ specifies…
This study introduces an optimal mechanism in a dynamic stochastic knapsack environment. The model features a single seller who has a fixed quantity of a perfectly divisible item. Impatient buyers with a piece-wise linear utility function…
Dynamic mechanism design is a challenging extension to ordinary mechanism design in which the mechanism designer must make a sequence of decisions over time in the face of possibly untruthful reports of participating agents. Optimizing…
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…
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…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
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 study the problem of selling information to a data-buyer who faces a decision problem under uncertainty. We consider the classic Bayesian decision-theoretic model pioneered by [Blackwell, 1951, 1953]. Initially, the data buyer has only…