Related papers: The Limits of an Information Intermediary in Aucti…
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…
We study the information design problem in a single-unit auction setting. The information designer controls independent private signals according to which the buyers infer their binary private values. Assuming that the seller adopts the…
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…
A seller is pricing identical copies of a good to a stream of unit-demand buyers. Each buyer has a value on the good as his private information. The seller only knows the empirical value distribution of the buyer population and chooses the…
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
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…
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…
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…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
A seller offers an asset in a decentralised market. Buyers have private signals about their common value. I study whether the market becomes allocatively more efficient with (i) more buyers, (ii) better-informed buyers. Both increase the…
Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
We examine information structure design, also called "persuasion" or "signaling", in the presence of a constraint on the amount of communication. We focus on the fundamental setting of bilateral trade, which in its simplest form involves a…
We consider a platform facilitating trade between sellers and buyers with the objective of maximizing consumer surplus. Even though in many such marketplaces prices are set by revenue-maximizing sellers, platforms can influence prices…
We consider the single-item interdependent value setting, where there is a monopolist, $n$ buyers, and each buyer has a private signal $s_i$ describing a piece of information about the item. Each bidder $i$ also has a valuation function…
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…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
We study a classical Bayesian mechanism design problem where a seller is selling multiple items to multiple buyers. We consider the case where the seller has costs to produce the items, and these costs are private information to the seller.…
A single unit of a good is sold to one of two bidders. Each bidder has either a high prior valuation or a low prior valuation for the good. Their prior valuations are independently and identically distributed. Each bidder may observe an…