Related papers: Tight Revenue Gaps among Multi-Unit Mechanisms
We study the classic bilateral trade setting. Myerson and Satterthwaite show that there is no Bayesian incentive compatible and budget-balanced mechanism that obtains the gains from trade of the first-best mechanism. Consider the…
Consider a monopolist selling $n$ items to an additive buyer whose item values are drawn from independent distributions $F_1,F_2,\ldots,F_n$ possibly having unbounded support. Unlike in the single-item case, it is well known that the…
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…
We study revenue maximization through sequential posted-price (SPP) mechanisms in single-dimensional settings with $n$ buyers and independent but not necessarily identical value distributions. We construct the SPP mechanisms by considering…
We consider an auction of identical digital goods to customers whose valuations are drawn independently from known distributions. Myerson's classic result identifies the truthful mechanism that maximizes the seller's expected profit. Under…
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…
Myerson derived a simple and elegant solution to the single-parameter revenue-maximization problem in his seminal work on optimal auction design assuming the usual model of quasi-linear utilities. In this paper, we consider a slight…
In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for reducing the $k$-item $n$-bidder auction with additive valuation to $k$-item $1$-bidder auctions. This approach, called the \emph{Best-Guess} reduction, can be applied to address several…
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…
Classical Bayesian mechanism design relies on the common prior assumption, but such prior is often not available in practice. We study the design of prior-independent mechanisms that relax this assumption: the seller is selling an…
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…
We study multidimensional mechanism design in a common scenario where players have private information about their willingness to pay and their ability to pay. We provide a complete characterization of dominant-strategy incentive-compatible…
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 consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be…
We develop efficient algorithms to construct utility maximizing mechanisms in the presence of risk averse players (buyers and sellers) in Bayesian settings. We model risk aversion by a concave utility function, and players play…
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…
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…
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…
We study the multi-item mechanism design problem where a monopolist sells $n$ heterogeneous items to a single buyer. We focus on buy-many mechanisms, a natural class of mechanisms frequently used in practice. The buy-many property allows…
Multi-item mechanisms can be very complex offering many different bundles to the buyer that could even be randomized. Such complexity is thought to be necessary as the revenue gaps between randomized and deterministic mechanisms, or…