Related papers: Selling two complementary goods
I construct a novel random double auction as a robust bilateral trading mechanism for a profit-maximizing intermediary who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. It works as follows. The intermediary publicly commits to charging a…
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…
We consider the bilateral trade problem, in which two agents trade a single indivisible item. It is known that the only dominant-strategy truthful mechanism is the fixed-price mechanism: given commonly known distributions of the buyer's…
A sequence of recent studies show that even in the simple setting of a single seller and a single buyer with additive, independent valuations over $m$ items, the revenue-maximizing mechanism is prohibitively complex. This problem has been…
We consider online procurement auctions, where the agents arrive sequentially, in random order, and have private costs for their services. The buyer aims to maximize a monotone submodular value function for the subset of agents whose…
We consider the problem of maximizing revenue when selling k items to a single buyer with known valuation distributions. We show that for a single, additive buyer whose valuations for for the items are distributed according to i.i.d.…
We study revenue maximization by deterministic mechanisms for the simplest case for which Myerson's characterization does not hold: a single seller selling two items, with independently distributed values, to a single additive buyer. We…
We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…
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…
A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…
We study the problem of a principal who wants to influence an agent's observable action, subject to an ex-post budget. The agent has a private type determining their cost function. This paper endogenizes the value of the resource driving…
We consider optimal mechanism design for the case with one buyer and two items. The buyer's valuations towards the two items are independent and additive. In this setting, optimal mechanism is unknown for general valuation distributions. We…
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…
Emek et al. presented a model of probabilistic single-item second price auctions where an auctioneer who is informed about the type of an item for sale, broadcasts a signal about this type to uninformed bidders. They proved that finding the…
We study a new model of complementary valuations, which we call "proportional complementarities." In contrast to common models, such as hypergraphic valuations, in our model, we do not assume that the extra value derived from owning a set…
We study robust mechanisms to sell a common-value good. We assume that the mechanism designer knows the prior distribution of the buyers' common value but is unsure of the buyers' information structure about the common value. We use linear…
We apply marginal analysis \`a la Bulow and Roberts (1989) to characterize revenue-maximizing selling mechanisms for a multiproduct monopoly. We derive marginal revenue from price perturbations over arbitrary sets of bundles and show that…
A seller chooses a reserve price in a second-price auction to maximize worst-case expected revenue when she knows only the mean of value distribution and an upper bound on either values themselves or variance. Values are private and iid.…
We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a selfish mediator who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. We consider a setting where the mediator does not have information advantage and the buyer's…
We consider the problem of designing a revenue-optimal mechanism in the two-item, single-buyer, unit-demand setting when the buyer's valuations, $(z_1, z_2)$, are uniformly distributed in an arbitrary rectangle $[c,c+b_1]\times[c,c+b_2]$ in…