Related papers: Worst-Case Welfare of Item Pricing in the Tollboot…
In the \emph{tollbooth problem}, we are given a tree $\bT=(V,E)$ with $n$ edges, and a set of $m$ customers, each of whom is interested in purchasing a path on the tree. Each customer has a fixed budget, and the objective is to price the…
An instance of the tollbooth problem consists of an undirected network and a collection of single-minded customers, each of which is interested in purchasing a fixed path subject to an individual budget constraint. The objective is to…
We study an envy-free pricing problem, in which each buyer wishes to buy a shortest path connecting her individual pair of vertices in a network owned by a single vendor. The vendor sets the prices of individual edges with the aim of…
We study a natural combinatorial pricing problem for sequentially arriving buyers with equal budgets. Each buyer is interested in exactly one pair of items and purchases this pair if and only if, upon arrival, both items are still available…
In this paper we consider the online Submodular Welfare (SW) problem. In this problem we are given $n$ bidders each equipped with a general (not necessarily monotone) submodular utility and $m$ items that arrive online. The goal is to…
We study the allocation of indivisible items that form an undirected graph and investigate the worst-case welfare loss when requiring that each agent must receive a connected subgraph. Our focus is on both egalitarian and utilitarian…
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…
In various markets where sellers compete in price, price oscillations are observed rather than convergence to equilibrium. Such fluctuations have been empirically observed in the retail market for gasoline, in airline pricing and in the…
We study the problem of social welfare maximization in bilateral trade, where two agents, a buyer and a seller, trade an indivisible item. We consider arguably the simplest form of mechanisms -- the fixed-price mechanisms, where the…
We study online combinatorial auctions with production costs proposed by Blum et al. using the online primal dual framework. In this model, buyers arrive online, and the seller can produce multiple copies of each item subject to a…
We study market mechanisms for allocating divisible goods to competing agents with quasilinear utilities. For \emph{linear} pricing (i.e., the cost of a good is proportional to the quantity purchased), the First Welfare Theorem states that…
We consider a robust version of the revenue maximization problem, where a single seller wishes to sell $n$ items to a single unit-demand buyer. In this robust version, the seller knows the buyer's marginal value distribution for each item…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible items to agents with additive valuations, under the additional constraint that bundles must be connected in an underlying item graph. Previous work has considered the existence and complexity…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We study the design of truthful auctions for selling identical items in unlimited supply (e.g., digital goods) to n unit demand buyers. This classic problem stands out from profit-maximizing auction design literature as it requires no…
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 present pricing mechanisms for several online resource allocation problems which obtain tight or nearly tight approximations to social welfare. In our settings, buyers arrive online and purchase bundles of items; buyers' values for the…
The inefficiency of the Wardrop equilibrium of nonatomic routing games can be eliminated by placing tolls on the edges of a network so that the socially optimal flow is induced as an equilibrium flow. A solution where the minimum number of…
Complements between goods - where one good takes on added value in the presence of another - have been a thorn in the side of algorithmic mechanism designers. On the one hand, complements are common in the standard motivating applications…