Related papers: Information Design in Optimal Auctions
With the increasing use of auctions in online advertising, there has been a large effort to study seller revenue maximization, following Myerson's seminal work, both theoretically and practically. We take the point of view of the buyer in…
This paper studies the incentives of the seller and buyers to shill bid in a single-item auction. An auction is seller identity-compatible if the seller cannot profit from pretending to be one or more bidders via fake identities. It is…
This paper studies some basic problems in a multiple-object auction model using methodologies from theoretical computer science. We are especially concerned with situations where an adversary bidder knows the bidding algorithms of all the…
Motivated by the problem of selling large, proprietary data, we consider an information pricing problem proposed by Bergemann et al. that involves a decision-making buyer and a monopolistic seller. The seller has access to the underlying…
A common practice in many auctions is to offer bidders an opportunity to improve their bids, known as a Best and Final Offer (BAFO) stage. This final bid can depend on new information provided about either the asset or the competitors. This…
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…
We study a basic auction design problem with online supply. There are two unit-demand bidders and two types of items. The first item type will arrive first for sure, and the second item type may or may not arrive. The auctioneer has to…
We consider a queue with an unobservable backlog by the incoming users. There is an information designer that observes the queue backlog and makes recommendations to the users arriving at the queue whether to join or not to join the queue.…
Motivated by practical constraints in online advertising, we investigate single-parameter auction design for bidders with constraints on their Return On Investment (ROI) -- a targeted minimum ratio between the obtained value and the…
A seller sells an object over time but is uncertain how the buyer learns their willingness-to-pay. We consider informational robustness under \textit{limited commitment}, where the seller offers a price \textit{each period} to maximize…
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 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 analyze a nonlinear pricing model where the seller controls both product pricing (screening) and buyer information about their own values (persuasion). We prove that the optimal mechanism always consists of finitely many signals and…
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…
We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
We study auction design in a setting where agents can communicate over a censorship-resistant broadcast channel like the ones we can implement over a public blockchain. We seek to design credible, strategyproof auctions in a model that…
Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…
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…
Firms and statistical agencies must protect the privacy of the individuals whose data they collect, analyze, and publish. Increasingly, these organizations do so by using publication mechanisms that satisfy differential privacy. We consider…