Related papers: Cursed yet Satisfied Agents
We study the two-agent single-item bilateral trade. Ideally, the trade should happen whenever the buyer's value for the item exceeds the seller's cost. However, the classical result of Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that no mechanism can…
The auction theory literature has so far focused mostly on the design of mechanisms that takes the revenue or the efficiency as a yardstick. However, scenarios where the {\it capacity}, which we define as \textit{``the number of bidders the…
We introduce the problem of assigning resources to improve their utilization. The motivation comes from settings where agents have uncertainty about their own values for using a resource, and where it is in the interest of a group that…
It is well known that reinforcement learning can be cast as inference in an appropriate probabilistic model. However, this commonly involves introducing a distribution over agent trajectories with probabilities proportional to exponentiated…
Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…
We study mechanism design when agents may have hidden secondary goals which will manifest as non-trivial preferences among outcomes for which their primary utility is the same. We show that in such cases, a mechanism is robust against…
For job scheduling systems, where jobs require some amount of processing and then leave the system, it is natural for each user to provide an estimate of their job's time requirement in order to aid the scheduler. However, if there is no…
We consider the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations. Ex-ante fairness (proportionality) can trivially be obtained by giving all goods to a random agent. Yet, such an allocation is…
We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with {\em bivalued submodular valuations} -- each good provides a marginal gain of either $a$ or $b$ ($a < b$) and goods have decreasing marginal gains. This…
In the allocation of resources to a set of agents, how do fairness guarantees impact the social welfare? A quantitative measure of this impact is the price of fairness, which measures the worst-case loss of social welfare due to fairness…
We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…
In this paper, we study online double auctions, where multiple sellers and multiple buyers arrive and depart dynamically to exchange one commodity. We show that there is no deterministic online double auction that is truthful and…
We study truthful mechanisms for welfare maximization in online bipartite matching. In our (multi-parameter) setting, every buyer is associated with a (possibly private) desired set of items, and has a private value for being assigned an…
Mechanism design is addressed in the context of fair allocations of indivisible goods with monetary compensation. Motivated by a real-world social choice problem, mechanisms with verification are considered in a setting where (i) agents'…
We introduce a multi-armed bandit model where the reward is a sum of multiple random variables, and each action only alters the distributions of some of them. After each action, the agent observes the realizations of all the variables. This…
We provide a computationally efficient black-box reduction from mechanism design to algorithm design in very general settings. Specifically, we give an approximation-preserving reduction from truthfully maximizing \emph{any} objective under…
Developing efficient sequential bidding strategies for repeated auctions is an important practical challenge in various marketing tasks. In this setting, the bidding agent obtains information, on both the value of the item at sale and the…
We present a quantum auction protocol using superpositions to represent bids and distributed search to identify the winner(s). Measuring the final quantum state gives the auction outcome while simultaneously destroying the superposition.…
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…
We study the fundamental, classical mechanism design problem of single-buyer multi-item Bayesian revenue-maximizing auctions under the lens of communication complexity between the buyer and the seller. Specifically, we ask whether using…