Related papers: 99% Revenue with Constant Enhanced Competition
We propose a combinatorial ascending auction that is "approximately" optimal, requiring minimal rationality to achieve this level of optimality, and is robust to strategic and distributional uncertainties. Specifically, the auction is…
We consider the problem of repeatedly auctioning a single item to multiple i.i.d buyers who each use a no-regret learning algorithm to bid over time. In particular, we study the seller's optimal revenue, if they know that the buyers are…
We are interested in the problem of optimal commitments in rank-and-bid based auctions, a general class of auctions that include first price and all-pay auctions as special cases. Our main contribution is a novel approach to solve for…
We study sequential procurement auctions where the sellers are provided with a ``best and final offer'' (BAFO) strategy. This strategy allows each seller $i$ to effectively ``freeze'' their price while remaining active in the auction, and…
Online Resource Allocation addresses the problem of efficiently allocating limited resources to buyers with incomplete knowledge of future requests. In our setting, buyers arrive sequentially requesting a set of items, each with a value…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
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…
We consider the practical and classical setting where the seller is using an exploration stage to learn the value distributions of the bidders before running a revenue-maximizing auction in a exploitation phase. In this two-stage process,…
We consider a principal seller with $m$ heterogeneous products to sell to an additive buyer over independent items. The principal can offer an arbitrary menu of product bundles, but faces competition from smaller and more agile single-item…
Sellers often prescreen potential bidders, restricting participation to a select group of capable participants. Recent advances in machine learning and generative AI make this strategy increasingly viable by enabling the cost-effective…
We provide a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for the Bayesian optimal multi-item multi-bidder auction problem under two conditions. First, bidders are independent, have additive valuations and are from the same population.…
We revisit the problem of designing the profit-maximizing single-item auction, solved by Myerson in his seminal paper for the case in which bidder valuations are independently distributed. We focus on general joint distributions, seeking…
The standard framework of online bidding algorithm design assumes that the seller commits himself to faithfully implementing the rules of the adopted auction. However, the seller may attempt to cheat in execution to increase his revenue if…
We introduce several new estimation methods that leverage shape constraints in auction models to estimate various objects of interest, including the distribution of a bidder's valuations, the bidder's ex ante expected surplus, and the…
Standard ad auction formats do not immediately extend to settings where multiple size configurations and layouts are available to advertisers. In these settings, the sale of web advertising space increasingly resembles a combinatorial…
We provide efficient estimation methods for first- and second-price auctions under independent (asymmetric) private values and partial observability. Given a finite set of observations, each comprising the identity of the winner and the…
Internet search companies sell advertisement slots based on users' search queries via an auction. While there has been a lot of attention on the auction process and its game-theoretic aspects, our focus is on the advertisers. In particular,…
In lowest unique bid auctions, $N$ players bid for an item. The winner is whoever places the \emph{lowest} bid, provided that it is also unique. We use a grand canonical approach to derive an analytical expression for the equilibrium…
I study the design of auctions in which the auctioneer is assumed to have information only about the marginal distribution of a generic bidder's valuation, but does not know the correlation structure of the joint distribution of bidders'…
In this paper, we consider the problem of optimizing the revenue a web publisher gets through real-time bidding (i.e. from ads sold in real-time auctions) and direct (i.e. from ads sold through contracts agreed in advance). We consider a…