Related papers: Selling two complementary goods
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…
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…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
We provide sufficient conditions for revenue maximization in a two-good monopoly where the buyer's values for the items come from independent (but not necessarily identical) distributions over bounded intervals. Under certain distributional…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
We consider the design of a revenue-optimal mechanism when two items are available to be sold to a single buyer whose valuation is uniformly distributed over an arbitrary rectangle $[c_1,c_1+b_1]\times[c_2,c_2+b_2]$ in the positive…
Maximizing the revenue from selling _more than one_ good (or item) to a single buyer is a notoriously difficult problem, in stark contrast to the one-good case. For two goods, we show that simple "one-dimensional" mechanisms, such as…
We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…
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…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…
It is well-known that optimal (i.e., revenue-maximizing) selling mechanisms in multidimensional type spaces may involve randomization. We obtain conditions under which deterministic mechanisms are optimal for selling two identical,…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
We provide a new, much simplified and straightforward proof to a result of Pavlov [2011] regarding the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling two goods with uniformly i.i.d. valuations over intervals $[c,c+1]$, to an additive buyer. This…
We consider a model of a data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has a private valuation of the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct…
We consider a model of bilateral trade with private values. The value of the buyer and the cost of the seller are jointly distributed. The true joint distribution is unknown to the designer, however, the marginal distributions of the value…
The buying and selling of information is taking place at a scale unprecedented in the history of commerce, thanks to the formation of online marketplaces for user data. Data providing agencies sell user information to advertisers to allow…
I consider an environment in which a decision maker faces uncertainty and privately holds information in the form of a signal about the true state of the world. The decision maker purchases additional information from a data broker before…