Related papers: Cursed yet Satisfied Agents
A longstanding question in the judgment and decision making literature is whether experts, even in high-stakes environments, exhibit the same cognitive biases observed in controlled experiments with inexperienced participants. Massey and…
We study a mechanism-design problem in which spiteful agents strive to not only maximize their rewards but also, contingent upon their own payoff levels, seek to lower the opponents' rewards. We characterize all individually rational (IR)…
Decision-makers often deploy the best-performing treatment from a randomized experiment, creating a winner's curse: selection favors treatments whose observed outcomes are high partly because of statistical noise, so the na\"ive estimate of…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
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…
The Probabilistic Serial mechanism is well-known for its desirable fairness and efficiency properties. It is one of the most prominent protocols for the random assignment problem. However, Probabilistic Serial is not incentive-compatible,…
This paper considers prior-independent mechanism design, namely identifying a single mechanism that has near optimal performance on every prior distribution. We show that mechanisms with truthtelling equilibria, a.k.a., revelation…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
We study how cursedness, the tendency to neglect how other people's strategies depend on their private information, affects information transmission in Spence's job market signaling game. We characterize the Cursed Sequential Equilibrium…
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 consider a selfish variant of the knapsack problem. In our version, the items are owned by agents, and each agent can misrepresent the set of items she owns---either by avoiding reporting some of them (understating), or by reporting…
A major challenge in data-driven decision-making is accurate policy evaluation-i.e., guaranteeing that a learned decision-making policy achieves the promised benefits. A popular strategy is model-based policy evaluation, which estimates a…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
A rapidly growing literature on lying in behavioral economics and psychology shows that individuals often do not lie even when lying maximizes their utility. In this work, we attempt to incorporate these findings into the theory of…
The paper designs revenue-maximizing auction mechanisms for agents who aim to maximize their total obtained values rather than the classical quasi-linear utilities. Several models have been proposed to capture the behaviors of such agents…
We investigate the power of randomness in the context of a fundamental Bayesian optimal mechanism design problem--a single seller aims to maximize expected revenue by allocating multiple kinds of resources to "unit-demand" agents with…
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
We advance empirical equilibrium analysis (Velez and Brown, 2020, arXiv:1907.12408) of the winner-bid and loser-bid auctions for the dissolution of a partnership. We show, in a complete information environment, that even though these…
Auctions in which agents' payoffs are random variables have received increased attention in recent years. In particular, recent work in algorithmic mechanism design has produced mechanisms employing internal randomization, partly in…
We build upon recent work [Kleinberg and Oren, 2014, Kleinberg et al., 2016, 2017] that considers present biased agents, who place more weight on costs they must incur now than costs they will incur in the future. They consider a graph…