Related papers: Competitive equilibrium always exists for combinat…

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…

We study markets of indivisible items in which price-based (Walrasian) equilibria often do not exist due to the discrete non-convex setting. Instead we consider Nash equilibria of the market viewed as a game, where players bid for items,…

Platforms design the form of presentation by which sellers are shown to the buyers. This design not only shapes the buyers' experience but also leads to different market equilibria or dynamics. One component in this design is through the…

Two issues of algorithmic collusion are addressed in this paper. First, we show that in a general class of symmetric games, including Prisoner's Dilemma, Bertrand competition, and any (nonlinear) mixture of first and second price auction,…

The purpose of this paper is to apply the economics field of market design to develop a simple algebraic and graphic model of a combinatorial auction for formulary position assignments.

We study whether large language models acting as autonomous bidders can tacitly collude by coordinating when to accept platform posted payouts in repeated Dutch auctions, without any communication. We present a minimal repeated auction…

Applications of combinatorial auctions (CA) as market mechanisms are prevalent in practice, yet their Bayesian Nash equilibria (BNE) remain poorly understood. Analytical solutions are known only for a few cases where the problem can be…

We study competition between firms in labor markets, following a combinatorial model suggested by Kelso and Crawford [1982]. In this model, each firm is trying to recruit workers by offering a higher salary than its competitors, and its…

Combinatorial auctions where agents can bid on bundles of items are desirable because they allow the agents to express complementarity and substitutability between the items. However, expressing one's preferences can require bidding on all…

We present a methodology to robustly estimate the competitive equilibria (CE) of combinatorial markets under the assumption that buyers do not know their precise valuations for bundles of goods, but instead can only provide noisy estimates.…

Dynamic pricing schemes were introduced as an alternative to posted-price mechanisms. In contrast to static models, the dynamic setting allows to update the prices between buyer-arrivals based on the remaining sets of items and buyers, and…

We develop a model of algorithmic pricing that shuts down every channel for explicit or implicit collusion while still generating collusive outcomes. We analyze the dynamics of a duopoly market where both firms use pricing algorithms…

In sponsored search, a number of advertising slots is available on a search results page, and have to be allocated among a set of advertisers competing to display an ad on the page. This gives rise to a bipartite matching market that is…

We study the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…

Competitive equilibrium from equal incomes (CEEI) is a classic solution to the problem of fair and efficient allocation of goods [Foley'67, Varian'74]. Every agent receives an equal budget of artificial currency with which to purchase…

The connection between games and no-regret algorithms has been widely studied in the literature. A fundamental result is that when all players play no-regret strategies, this produces a sequence of actions whose time-average is a…

Motivated by online advertising auctions, we study auction design in repeated auctions played by simple Artificial Intelligence algorithms (Q-learning). We find that first-price auctions with no additional feedback lead to tacit-collusive…

We consider a package assignment problem with multiple units of indivisible items. The seller can specify preferences over partitions of their supply between buyers as packaging costs. We propose incremental costs together with a graph that…

In most of microeconomic theory, consumers are assumed to exhibit decreasing marginal utilities. This paper considers combinatorial auctions among such submodular buyers. The valuations of such buyers are placed within a hierarchy of…

Algorithmic Mechanism Design attempts to marry computation and incentives, mainly by leveraging monetary transfers between designer and selfish agents involved. This is principally because in absence of money, very little can be done to…