Related papers: Optimal Multi-Dimensional Mechanisms are not Local…
High-dimensional black-box optimisation remains an important yet notoriously challenging problem. Despite the success of Bayesian optimisation methods on continuous domains, domains that are categorical, or that mix continuous and…
We consider the provision of an abstract service to single-dimensional agents. Our model includes position auctions, single-minded combinatorial auctions, and constrained matching markets. When the agents' values are drawn from a…
Consider Myerson's optimal auction with respect to an inaccurate prior, e.g., estimated from data, which is an underestimation of the true value distribution. Can the auctioneer expect getting at least the optimal revenue w.r.t. the…
Diffusion auction is an emerging business model where a seller aims to incentivise buyers in a social network to diffuse the auction information thereby attracting potential buyers. We focus on designing mechanisms for multi-unit diffusion…
Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item auctions, where bidders have subadditive valuations over independent items. Providing a simple mechanism that is approximately revenue-optimal in this setting is a major open problem in mechanism…
To achieve a maximal locality in a trivial field theory, we maximize the ultraviolet cutoff of the theory by fine tuning the infrared values of the parameters. This optimization procedure is applied to the scalar theory in $D+1$ dimensions…
Local optimization presents a promising approach to expensive, high-dimensional black-box optimization by sidestepping the need to globally explore the search space. For objective functions whose gradient cannot be evaluated directly,…
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…
One of the most celebrated results in mechanism design is Myerson's characterization of the revenue optimal auction for selling a single item. However, this result relies heavily on the assumption that buyers are indifferent to risk. In…
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…
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…
Along with substantial progress made recently in designing near-optimal mechanisms for multi-item auctions, interesting structural questions have also been raised and studied. In particular, is it true that the seller can always extract…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
The Competition Complexity of an auction measures how much competition is needed for the revenue of a simple auction to surpass the optimal revenue. A classic result from auction theory by Bulow and Klemperer [9], states that the…
In a single-parameter mechanism design problem, a provider is looking to sell a service to a group of potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ has a private value $v_i$ for receiving the service and a feasibility constraint restricts which sets of…
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…
We present a polynomial-time algorithm that, given samples from the unknown valuation distribution of each bidder, learns an auction that approximately maximizes the auctioneer's revenue in a variety of single-parameter auction environments…
We consider the problem of learning optimal reserve price in repeated auctions against non-myopic bidders, who may bid strategically in order to gain in future rounds even if the single-round auctions are truthful. Previous algorithms,…
In markets such as digital advertising auctions, bidders want to maximize value rather than payoff. This is different to the utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes. We refer to…