Related papers: Information Design in Optimal Auctions
A monopoly seller is privately and imperfectly informed about the buyer's value of the product. The seller uses information to price discriminate the buyer. A designer offers a mechanism that provides the seller with additional information…
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…
We introduce a new numerical framework to learn optimal bidding strategies in repeated auctions when the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. Crucially, we do not assume that the bidders know what optimization mechanism is used…
We consider auction environments in which at the time of the auction bidders observe signals about their ex-post value. We introduce a model of novice bidders who do not know know the joint distribution of signals and instead build a…
We model a procurement scenario in which two \textit{imperfect} bidders act simultaneously on behalf of a single buyer, a configuration common in display advertising and referred to as \textit{side-by-side bidding} but largely unexplored in…
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 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 revisit the problem of designing the profit-maximizing single-item auction, solved by Myerson in his seminal paper for the case in which bidder valuations are independently distributed. We focus on general joint distributions, seeking…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution $D$ in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational…
We study the optimal behavior of a bidder in a real-time auction subject to the requirement that a specified collections of heterogeneous items be acquired within given time constraints. The problem facing this bidder is cast as a…
The $\textit{data market design}$ problem is a problem in economic theory to find a set of signaling schemes (statistical experiments) to maximize expected revenue to the information seller, where each experiment reveals some of the…
This paper studies optimal auction design when valuations depend endogenously on post-auction collaboration between the seller and the winning bidder. Both parties exert non-contractible efforts after the auction, generating a double moral…
A seller wants to sell an item to $n$ buyers. Buyer valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution unknown to the seller; the seller only knows that the support is included in $[a, b]$. To be robust, the seller chooses a DSIC mechanism…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
An information broker incentivizes consumers to share their information, while designing an information structure to shape the market segmentation. The information broker is a metaphor for an Internet platform that matches consumers with…
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…
Finding the optimal (revenue-maximizing) mechanism to sell multiple items has been a prominent and notoriously difficult open problem. Existing work has mainly focused on deriving analytical results tailored to a particular class of…
In a sequential auction with multiple bidding agents, it is highly challenging to determine the ordering of the items to sell in order to maximize the revenue due to the fact that the autonomy and private information of the agents heavily…