Related papers: Nonparametric inference on counterfactuals in firs…
Given a sample of bids from independent auctions, this paper examines the question of inference on auction fundamentals (e.g. valuation distributions, welfare measures) under weak assumptions on information structure. The question is…
We consider auction environments in which at the time of the auction bidders observe signals about their ex-post value. We introduce a model of novice bidders who do not know know the joint distribution of signals and instead build a…
In digital goods auctions, there is an auctioneer who sells an item with unlimited supply to a set of potential buyers, and the objective is to design truthful auction to maximize the total profit of the auctioneer. Motivated from an…
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 present a general framework for designing approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms for multi-item additive auctions, which applies to both truthful and non-truthful auctions. Given a (not necessarily truthful) single-item auction format…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
Bidding in simultaneous auctions is challenging because an agent's value for a good in one auction may depend on the uncertain outcome of other auctions: the so-called exposure problem. Given the gap in understanding of general simultaneous…
We study a setting where agents use no-regret learning algorithms to participate in repeated auctions. \citet{kolumbus2022auctions} showed, rather surprisingly, that when bidders participate in second-price auctions using no-regret bidding…
First-price auctions have many desirable properties, including uniquely possessing some, like credibility. However, first-price auctions are also inherently non-truthful, and non-truthfulness may result in instability and inefficiencies.…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
We study independent private values auction environments in which the auctioneer's revenue depends nonlinearly on bidders' interim winning probabilities. Our framework accommodates heterogeneity among bidders and places no ad hoc…
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…
Automated bidding to optimize online advertising with various constraints, e.g. ROI constraints and budget constraints, is widely adopted by advertisers. A key challenge lies in designing algorithms for non-truthful mechanisms with ROI…
We study a market for private data in which a data analyst publicly releases a statistic over a database of private information. Individuals that own the data incur a cost for their loss of privacy proportional to the differential privacy…
The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…
We study how a budget-constrained bidder should learn to adaptively bid in repeated first-price auctions to maximize her cumulative payoff. This problem arose due to an industry-wide shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions…
We propose nonparametric identification and semiparametric estimation of joint potential outcome distributions in the presence of confounding. First, in settings with observed confounding, we derive tighter, covariate-informed bounds on the…
We initiate the study of statistical inference and A/B testing for first-price pacing equilibria (FPPE). The FPPE model captures the dynamics resulting from large-scale first-price auction markets where buyers use pacing-based budget…
We consider the sample complexity of revenue maximization for multiple bidders in unrestricted multi-dimensional settings. Specifically, we study the standard model of $n$ additive bidders whose values for $m$ heterogeneous items are drawn…
While nonparametric density estimators often perform well on low dimensional data, their performance can suffer when applied to higher dimensional data, owing presumably to the curse of dimensionality. One technique for avoiding this is to…