Related papers: Distributionally Robust Pricing in Independent Pri…
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 provide sufficient conditions for revenue maximization in a two-good monopoly where the buyer's values for the items come from independent (but not necessarily identical) distributions over bounded intervals. Under certain distributional…
Auction is applied for trade with various mechanisms. A simple but practical question is which mechanism, typically first-price or second-price auctions, is preferred from the perspective of bidders or sellers. A celebrated answer is…
When selling many goods with independent valuations, we develop a distributionally robust framework, consisting of a two-player game between seller and nature. The seller has only limited knowledge about the value distribution. The seller…
The display advertising industry has recently transitioned from second- to first-price auctions as its primary mechanism for ad allocation and pricing. In light of this, publishers need to re-evaluate and optimize their auction parameters,…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
We provide efficient estimation methods for first- and second-price auctions under independent (asymmetric) private values and partial observability. Given a finite set of observations, each comprising the identity of the winner and the…
We study the revenue comparison problem of auctions when the seller has a maxmin expected utility preference. The seller holds a set of priors around some reference belief, interpreted as an approximating model of the true probability law…
We address the problem of improving bidders' strategies in prior-dependent revenue-maximizing auctions and introduce a simple and generic method to design novel bidding strategies if the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. We…
High-stakes auctions are often preceded by nonbinding communication between bidders and the seller. Motivated by these practices, this paper examines a two-period model in which two bidders send private cheap talk messages to the seller…
Motivated by pricing in ad exchange markets, we consider the problem of robust learning of reserve prices against strategic buyers in repeated contextual second-price auctions. Buyers' valuations for an item depend on the context that…
We study the problem of learning to bid when the bidder's value is dynamic, i.e., when the current value depends on past outcomes. Specifically, we consider a bidder participating in repeated second-price auctions whose value depends on the…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
Problem definition: Traditional monopoly pricing assumes sellers have full information about consumer valuations. We consider monopoly pricing under limited information, where a seller only knows the mean, variance and support of the…
A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…
We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…
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 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…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
We consider a repeated auction where the buyer's utility for an item depends on the time that elapsed since his last purchase. We present an algorithm to build the optimal bidding policy, and then, because optimal might be impractical, we…