Related papers: Revenue Monotonicity Under Misspecified Bidders
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…
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 dynamic mechanisms for optimizing revenue in repeated auctions, that are robust to heterogeneous forward-looking and learning behavior of the buyers. Typically it is assumed that the buyers are either all myopic or are all infinite…
Emek et al. presented a model of probabilistic single-item second price auctions where an auctioneer who is informed about the type of an item for sale, broadcasts a signal about this type to uninformed bidders. They proved that finding the…
In today's online advertising markets, it is common for advertisers to set long-term budgets. Correspondingly, advertising platforms adopt budget control methods to ensure that advertisers' payments lie within their budgets. Most budget…
Two sellers compete to sell identical products to a single buyer. Each seller chooses an arbitrary mechanism, possibly involving lotteries, to sell their product. The utility-maximizing buyer can choose to participate in one or both…
We study revenue maximization by deterministic mechanisms for the simplest case for which Myerson's characterization does not hold: a single seller selling two items, with independently distributed values, to a single additive buyer. We…
In a sponsored search auction the advertisement slots on a search result page are generally ordered by click-through rate. Bidders have a valuation, which is usually assumed to be linear in the click-through rate, a budget constraint, and…
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…
It is widely believed that computing payments needed to induce truthful bidding is somehow harder than simply computing the allocation. We show that the opposite is true: creating a randomized truthful mechanism is essentially as easy as a…
Sequential auctions for identical items with unit-demand, private-value buyers are common and often occur periodically without end, as new bidders replace departing ones. We model bidder uncertainty by introducing a probability that a…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
This paper develops the theory of mechanism redesign by which an auctioneer can reoptimize an auction based on bid data collected from previous iterations of the auction on bidders from the same market. We give a direct method for…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
We propose a combinatorial ascending auction that is "approximately" optimal, requiring minimal rationality to achieve this level of optimality, and is robust to strategic and distributional uncertainties. Specifically, the auction is…
Budget-management systems are one of the key components of modern auction markets. Internet advertising platforms typically offer advertisers the possibility to pace the rate at which their budget is depleted, through budget-pacing…
We consider the problem of an auctioneer who faces the task of selling a good (drawn from a known distribution) to a set of buyers, when the auctioneer does not have the capacity to describe to the buyers the exact identity of the good that…
The enhanced competition paradigm is an attempt at bridging the gap between simple and optimal auctions. In this line of work, given an auction setting with $m$ items and $n$ bidders, the goal is to find the smallest $n' \geq n$ such that…
We study a repeated trading problem in which a mechanism designer facilitates trade between a single seller and multiple buyers. Our model generalizes the classic bilateral trade setting to a multi-buyer environment. Specifically, the…
A seminal result of Bulow and Klemperer [1989] demonstrates the power of competition for extracting revenue: when selling a single item to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn i.i.d. from a regular distribution, the simple welfare-maximizing…