Related papers: An Optimal Distributionally Robust Auction

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…

Maximizing the revenue from selling _more than one_ good (or item) to a single buyer is a notoriously difficult problem, in stark contrast to the one-good case. For two goods, we show that simple "one-dimensional" mechanisms, such as…

We provide a characterization of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanisms in settings where a monopolist sells k items over k periods to a buyer who realizes his value for item i in the beginning of period i. We require that the mechanism…

We study probabilistic single-item second-price auctions where the item is characterized by a set of attributes. The auctioneer knows the actual instantiation of all the attributes, but he may choose to reveal only a subset of these…

We provide an elementary proof that revenue-maximizing mechanisms exist in multi-parameter settings whenever the distribution of valuations has finite expectation.

We study the problem of selling $n$ items to a single buyer with an additive valuation function. We consider the valuation of the items to be correlated, i.e., desirabilities of the buyer for the items are not drawn independently. Ideally,…

Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much 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.…

We provide algorithms that learn simple auctions whose revenue is approximately optimal in multi-item multi-bidder settings, for a wide range of valuations including unit-demand, additive, constrained additive, XOS, and subadditive. We…

A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. 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…

Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…

We consider the problem of designing revenue-optimal auctions for selling two items and bidders' valuations are independent among bidders but negatively correlated among items. In this paper, we obtain the closed-form optimal auction for…

We study simple and approximately optimal auctions for agents with a particular form of risk-averse preferences. We show that, for symmetric agents, the optimal revenue (given a prior distribution over the agent preferences) can be…

In this paper, we propose a novel sealed-bid auction framework to address the problem of dynamic spectrum allocation in cognitive radio (CR) networks. We design an optimal auction mechanism that maximizes the moderator's expected utility,…

There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by…

We consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…

We consider optimal mechanism design for the case with one buyer and two items. The buyer's valuations towards the two items are independent and additive. In this setting, optimal mechanism is unknown for general valuation distributions. We…

We study the problem of a buyer (aka auctioneer) who gains stochastic rewards by procuring multiple units of a service or item from a pool of heterogeneous strategic agents. The reward obtained for a single unit from an allocated agent…

We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…