Related papers: Information Design in Optimal Auctions
Assortment optimization concerns the problem of selling items with fixed prices to a buyer who will purchase at most one. Typically, retailers select a subset of items, corresponding to an "assortment" of brands to carry, and make each…
Sellers in online markets face the challenge of determining the right time to sell in view of uncertain future offers. Classical stopping theory assumes that sellers have full knowledge of the value distributions, and leverage this…
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 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…
Motivated by practical concerns in the online advertising industry, we study a bidder subset selection problem in single-item auctions. In this problem, a large pool of candidate bidders have independent values sampled from known prior…
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…
Auctions for perishable goods such as internet ad inventory need to make real-time allocation and pricing decisions as the supply of the good arrives in an online manner, without knowing the entire supply in advance. These allocation and…
This note pursues two primary objectives. First, we analyze the outcomes of an all-pay auction within a store where buyers with and without financial constraints arrive at varying rates, and where buyer types are private information.…
We study the classic single-item auction setting of Myerson, but under the assumption that the buyers' values for the item are distributed over finite supports. Using strong LP duality and polyhedral theory, we rederive various key results…
Internet advertisers (buyers) repeatedly procure ad impressions from ad platforms (sellers) with the aim to maximize total conversion (i.e. ad value) while respecting both budget and return-on-investment (ROI) constraints for efficient…
We study a market for private data in which a data analyst publicly releases a statistic over a database of private information. Individuals that own the data incur a cost for their loss of privacy proportional to the differential privacy…
We study efficiency loss in Bayesian revenue optimal auctions. We quantify this as the worst case ratio of loss in the realized social welfare to the social welfare that can be realized by an efficient auction. Our focus is on auctions with…
Auctions are important mechanisms extensively implemented in various markets, e.g., search engines' keyword auctions, antique auctions, etc. Finding an optimal auction mechanism is extremely difficult due to the constraints of imperfect…
We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…
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…
The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…
For selling a single item to agents with independent but non-identically distributed values, the revenue optimal auction is complex. With respect to it, Hartline and Roughgarden (2009) showed that the approximation factor of the…
Myerson derived a simple and elegant solution to the single-parameter revenue-maximization problem in his seminal work on optimal auction design assuming the usual model of quasi-linear utilities. In this paper, we consider a slight…
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…