Related papers: Multi-item Non-truthful Auctions Achieve Good Reve…
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,…
This paper considers the design of non-truthful mechanisms from samples. We identify a parameterized family of mechanisms with strategically simple winner-pays-bid, all-pay, and truthful payment formats. In general (not necessarily…
Online auction is a cornerstone of e-commerce, and a key challenge is designing incentive-compatible mechanisms that maximize expected revenue. Existing approaches often assume known bidder value distributions and fixed sets of bidders and…
We consider the problem of designing a revenue-optimal mechanism in the two-item, single-buyer, unit-demand setting when the buyer's valuations, $(z_1, z_2)$, are uniformly distributed in an arbitrary rectangle $[c,c+b_1]\times[c,c+b_2]$ in…
We study revenue optimization pricing algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation. We show that, in the case when both the seller and the buyer…
Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bids reach the seller directly. We study how this picture changes when a revenue-maximizing intermediary controls access to the seller's auction. Motivated by blockchain auctions, online…
For Bayesian combinatorial auctions, we present a general framework for approximately reducing the mechanism design problem for multiple buyers to single buyer sub-problems. Our framework can be applied to any setting which roughly…
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,…
Auctions in which agents' payoffs are random variables have received increased attention in recent years. In particular, recent work in algorithmic mechanism design has produced mechanisms employing internal randomization, partly in…
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…
With the increasing use of auctions in online advertising, there has been a large effort to study seller revenue maximization, following Myerson's seminal work, both theoretically and practically. We take the point of view of the buyer in…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
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…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions with budget constraints. In each period, the decision maker needs to submit a bid to win the auction and maximize the total collected reward, subject to…
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…
We revisit the classic problem of fair division from a mechanism design perspective, using {\em Proportional Fairness} as a benchmark. In particular, we aim to allocate a collection of divisible items to a set of agents while incentivizing…
The current art in optimal combinatorial auctions is limited to handling the case of single units of multiple items, with each bidder bidding on exactly one bundle (single minded bidders). This paper extends the current art by proposing an…
Consider a seller with m heterogeneous items for sale to a single additive buyer whose values for the items are arbitrarily correlated. It was previously shown that, in such settings, distributions exist for which the seller's optimal…
Consider Myerson's optimal auction with respect to an inaccurate prior, e.g., estimated from data, which is an underestimation of the true value distribution. Can the auctioneer expect getting at least the optimal revenue w.r.t. the…
We revisit the problem of designing the profit-maximizing single-item auction, solved by Myerson in his seminal paper for the case in which bidder valuations are independently distributed. We focus on general joint distributions, seeking…