Related papers: Selling Two Identical Objects
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…
A patient seller aims to sell a good to an impatient buyer (i.e., one who discounts utility over time). The buyer will remain in the market for a period of time $T$, and her private value is drawn from a publicly known distribution. What is…
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…
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…
Deterministic auctions are attractive in practice due to their transparency, simplicity, and ease of implementation, motivating a sharper understanding of when they can attain the same outcomes as randomized mechanisms. We study…
We consider a multi-dimensional screening problem of selling a product with multiple quality levels and design virtual value functions to derive conditions that imply optimality of only selling highest quality. A challenge of designing…
We consider a monopoly information holder selling information to a budget-constrained decision maker, who may benefit from the seller's information. The decision maker has a utility function that depends on his action and an uncertain state…
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…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…
We study gains from trade in multi-dimensional two-sided markets. Specifically, we focus on a setting with $n$ heterogeneous items, where each item is owned by a different seller $i$, and there is a constrained-additive buyer with…
We study the bilateral trade problem where a seller owns a single indivisible item, and a potential buyer seeks to purchase it. Previous mechanisms for this problem only considered the case where the values of the buyer and the seller are…
We consider the Item Pricing problem for revenue maximization in the limited supply setting, where a single seller with $n$ items caters to $m$ buyers with unknown subadditive valuation functions who arrive in a sequence. The seller sets…
Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic…
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…
We consider a fixed-price mechanism design setting where a seller sells one item via a social network, but the seller can only directly communicate with her neighbours initially. Each other node in the network is a potential buyer with a…
When selling information products, the seller can provide some free partial information to change people's valuations so that the overall revenue can possibly be increased. We study the general problem of advertising information products by…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item auctions, where bidders have subadditive valuations over independent items. Providing a simple mechanism that is approximately revenue-optimal in this setting is a major open problem in mechanism…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
A recent line of research has established a novel desideratum for designing approximately-revenue-optimal multi-item mechanisms, namely the buy-many constraint. Under this constraint, prices for different allocations made by the mechanism…
Diffusion auction design is a new trend in mechanism design for which the main goal is to incentivize existing buyers to invite new buyers, who are their neighbors on a social network, to join an auction even though they are competitors.…