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We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…
Motivated by applications in online marketplaces such as ride-hailing platforms and payment channel networks, we study a single-server queue with state-dependent arrival control. The service operator dynamically chooses the arrival rate as…
In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…
We consider Markovian many-server systems with admission control operating in a QED regime, where the relative utilization approaches unity while the number of servers grows large, providing natural Economies-of-Scale. In order to determine…
We introduce a general model of resource allocation with customer choice. In this model, there are multiple resources that are available over a finite horizon. The resources are non-replenishable and perishable. Each unit of a resource can…
We study the effects of allowing paid prioritization arrangements in a market with content provider (CP) competition. We consider competing CPs who pay prioritization fees to a monopolistic ISP so as to offset the ISP's cost for investing…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
Fixed pickup and delivery times can strongly limit the performance of freight transportation. Against this backdrop, fleet operators can use compensation mechanisms such as monetary incentives to buy delay time from their customers, in…
We study multi-buyer multi-item sequential item pricing mechanisms for revenue maximization with the goal of approximating a natural fractional relaxation -- the ex ante optimal revenue. We assume that buyers' values are subadditive but…
We consider strategic arrivals to a FCFS service system that starts service at a fixed time and has to serve a fixed number of customers, e.g., an airplane boarding system. Arriving early induces a higher waiting cost (waiting before…
A fundamental assumption in classical mechanism design is that buyers are perfect optimizers. However, in practice, buyers may be limited by their computational capabilities or a lack of information, and may not be able to perfectly…
Product ranking is the core problem for revenue-maximizing online retailers. To design proper product ranking algorithms, various consumer choice models are proposed to characterize the consumers' behaviors when they are provided with a…
Price discrimination for maximizing expected profit is a well-studied concept in economics and there are various methods that achieve the maximum given the user type distribution and the budget constraints. In many applications,…
We study revenue maximization through sequential posted-price (SPP) mechanisms in single-dimensional settings with $n$ buyers and independent but not necessarily identical value distributions. We construct the SPP mechanisms by considering…
Multi-item revenue-optimal mechanisms are known to be extremely complex, often offering buyers randomized lotteries of goods. In the standard buy-one model, it is known that optimal mechanisms can yield revenue infinitely higher than that…
In this paper, we present the first approximation algorithms for the problem of designing revenue optimal Bayesian incentive compatible auctions when there are multiple (heterogeneous) items and when bidders can have arbitrary demand and…
The design and pricing of services are two of the most important decisions faced by any intermodal transport operator. The key success factor lies in the ability of meeting the needs of the shippers. Therefore, making full use of the…
We study the envy free pricing problem faced by a seller who wishes to maximize revenue by setting prices for bundles of items. If there is an unlimited supply of items and agents are single minded then we show that finding the revenue…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
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…