Related papers: Simple Economies are Almost Optimal
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
This paper studies optimal auction design when valuations depend endogenously on post-auction collaboration between the seller and the winning bidder. Both parties exert non-contractible efforts after the auction, generating a double moral…
In many settings, money is a tool of exchange with minimal inherent utility --- agents will spend it in a way that maximizes the value of goods received subject to reasonable constraints, giving only second-order consideration to the…
In an all-pay auction, only one bidder wins but all bidders must pay the auctioneer. All-pay bidding games arise from attaching a similar bidding structure to traditional combinatorial games to determine which player moves next. In contrast…
In a two-round auction, a subset of bidders is selected (probabilistically), according to their bids in the first round, for the second round, where they can increase their bids. We formalize the two-round auction model, restricting the…
We study the problem of setting a price for a potential buyer with a valuation drawn from an unknown distribution $D$. The seller has "data"' about $D$ in the form of $m \ge 1$ i.i.d. samples, and the algorithmic challenge is to use these…
In markets such as digital advertising auctions, bidders want to maximize value rather than payoff. This is different to the utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes. We refer to…
We study a classic Bayesian mechanism design setting of monopoly problem for an additive buyer in the presence of budgets. In this setting a monopolist seller with $m$ heterogeneous items faces a single buyer and seeks to maximize her…
We study the optimal behavior of a bidder in a real-time auction subject to the requirement that a specified collections of heterogeneous items be acquired within given time constraints. The problem facing this bidder is cast as a…
We study the problem of finding the optimal bidding strategy for an advertiser in a multi-platform auction setting. The competition on a platform is captured by a value and a cost function, mapping bidding strategies to value and cost…
A platform commits to a search algorithm that maps prices to search order. Given this algorithm, sellers set prices, and consumers engage in sequential search. This framework generalizes the ordered search literature. We introduce a special…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…
We study the problem of learning revenue-optimal multi-bidder auctions from samples when the samples of bidders' valuations can be adversarially corrupted or drawn from distributions that are adversarially perturbed. First, we prove tight…
We consider a repeated auction where the buyer's utility for an item depends on the time that elapsed since his last purchase. We present an algorithm to build the optimal bidding policy, and then, because optimal might be impractical, we…
A double auction game with an infinite number of buyers and sellers is introduced. All sellers posses one unit of a good, all buyers desire to buy one unit. Each seller and each buyer has a private valuation of the good. The distribution of…
In a sponsored search auction, decisions about how to rank ads impose tradeoffs between objectives such as revenue and welfare. In this paper, we examine how these tradeoffs should be made. We begin by arguing that the most natural solution…
Since 2019, most ad exchanges and sell-side platforms (SSPs), in the online advertising industry, shifted from second to first price auctions. Due to the fundamental difference between these auctions, demand-side platforms (DSPs) have had…
Inspired by Internet ad auction applications, we study the problem of allocating a single item via an auction when bidders place very different values on the item. We formulate this as the problem of prior-free auction and focus on…
Motivated by recent progress on pricing in the AI literature, we study marketplaces that contain multiple vendors offering identical or similar products and unit-demand buyers with different valuations on these vendors. The objective of…