Related papers: Robust double auction mechanisms
This paper reexamines the classic problem of revenue maximization in single-item auctions with $n$ buyers under the lens of the robust optimization framework. The celebrated Myerson's mechanism is the format that maximizes the seller's…
Mechanism design, a branch of economics, aims to design rules that can autonomously achieve desired outcomes in resource allocation and public decision making. The research on mechanism design using machine learning is called automated…
A buyer wishes to purchase a durable good from a seller who in each period chooses a mechanism under limited commitment. The buyer's valuation is binary and fully persistent. We show that posted prices implement all equilibrium outcomes of…
Designing revenue optimal auctions for selling an item to $n$ symmetric bidders is a fundamental problem in mechanism design. Myerson (1981) shows that the second price auction with an appropriate reserve price is optimal when bidders'…
We initiate the study of efficient mechanism design with guaranteed good properties even when players participate in multiple different mechanisms simultaneously or sequentially. We define the class of smooth mechanisms, related to smooth…
The Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction used typically to model sponsored search auctions does not include the notion of budget constraints, which is present in practice. Motivated by this, we introduce the different variants of GSP…
We provide simple and approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms in the multi-item multi-bidder settings. We unify and improve all previous results, as well as generalize the results to broader cases. In particular, we prove that the better…
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…
Motivated by applications such as online labor markets we consider a variant of the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem where we have a collection of arms representing strategic agents with different performance characteristics. The…
The existing literature on optimal auctions focuses on optimizing the expected revenue of the seller, and is appropriate for risk-neutral sellers. In this paper, we identify good mechanisms for risk-averse sellers. As is standard in the…
A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…
In classic auction theory, reserve prices are known to be effective for improving revenue for the auctioneer against quasi-linear utility maximizing bidders. The introduction of reserve prices, however, usually do not help improve total…
A canonical setting for non-monetary online resource allocation is one where agents compete over multiple rounds for a single item per round, with i.i.d. valuations and additive utilities across rounds. With $n$ symmetric agents, a natural…
In this paper we derive robust super- and subhedging dualities for contingent claims that can depend on several underlying assets. In addition to strict super- and subhedging, we also consider relaxed versions which, instead of eliminating…
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 show that in the single-parameter mechanism design environment, the only non-wasteful, symmetric, incentive compatible and Sybil-proof direct mechanism is a second price auction with symmetric tie-breaking. Thus, if there is private…
Bilateral trade is a fundamental economic scenario comprising a strategically acting buyer and seller, each holding valuations for the item, drawn from publicly known distributions. A mechanism is supposed to facilitate trade between these…
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…
All-pay auctions, a common mechanism for various human and agent interactions, suffers, like many other mechanisms, from the possibility of players' failure to participate in the auction. We model such failures, and fully characterize…
We study equilibria in two-buyer sequential second-price (or first-price) auctions for identical goods. Buyers have weakly decreasing incremental values, and we make a behavioural no-overbidding assumption: the buyers do not bid above their…