Related papers: Revelation Gap for Pricing from Samples
We study fair allocation of indivisible goods among strategic agents with additive valuations. Motivated by impossibility results for deterministic truthful mechanisms, we focus on randomized mechanisms that are…
We study no-money mechanisms for allocating indivisible items to strategic agents with additive preferences under a stochastic model. In this model, items' values are drawn from an underlying distribution and mechanisms are evaluated with…
A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
This paper considers Bayesian revenue maximization in the $k$-unit setting, where a monopolist seller has $k$ copies of an indivisible item and faces $n$ unit-demand buyers (whose value distributions can be non-identical). Four basic…
We study dynamic pricing where a seller repeatedly interacts with a strategic, non-myopic buyer who has a fixed private valuation and discounts future utility. Prior work focused exclusively on posted-price mechanisms, which only extract…
In many settings the power of truthful mechanisms is severely bounded. In this paper we use randomization to overcome this problem. In particular, we construct an FPTAS for multi-unit auctions that is truthful in expectation, whereas there…
We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $k$ heterogeneous items for sale to a single additive buyer, whose values are drawn from a known, possibly correlated prior $\mathcal{D}$. It is known that there exist priors $\mathcal{D}$ such…
We consider the problem of designing a revenue-maximizing auction for a single item, when the values of the bidders are drawn from a correlated distribution. We observe that there exists an algorithm that finds the optimal randomized…
We present and discuss general techniques for proving inapproximability results for truthful mechanisms. We make use of these techniques to prove lower bounds on the approximability of several non-utilitarian multi-parameter problems. In…
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 study the design of truthful mechanisms for set systems, i.e., scenarios where a customer needs to hire a team of agents to perform a complex task. In this setting, frugality [Archer&Tardos'02] provides a measure to evaluate the "cost of…
In this paper, we study a problem of truthful mechanism design for a strategic variant of the generalized assignment problem (GAP) in a both payment-free and prior-free environment. In GAP, a set of items has to be optimally assigned to a…
For revenue and welfare maximization in single-dimensional Bayesian settings, Chawla et al. (STOC10) recently showed that sequential posted-price mechanisms (SPMs), though simple in form, can perform surprisingly well compared to the…
Task allocation is a crucial process in modern systems, but it is often challenged by incomplete information about the utilities of participating agents. In this paper, we propose a new profit maximization mechanism for the task allocation…
There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by…
We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods among $n$ strategic agents. It is well-known that truthfulness is incompatible with any meaningful fairness notions. We bypass the strong negative result by considering the concept…
Most methods for publishing data with privacy guarantees introduce randomness into datasets which reduces the utility of the published data. In this paper, we study the privacy-utility tradeoff by taking maximal leakage as the privacy…
We consider prior-free auctions for revenue and welfare maximization when agents have a common budget. The abstract environments we consider are ones where there is a downward-closed and symmetric feasibility constraint on the probabilities…
We provide the first separation in the approximation guarantee achievable by truthful and non-truthful combinatorial auctions with polynomial communication. Specifically, we prove that any truthful mechanism guaranteeing a…