Related papers: How To Sell (or Procure) in a Sequential Auction
We consider a class of auctions (Lowest Unique Bid Auctions) that have achieved a considerable success on the Internet. Bids are made in cents (of euro) and every bidder can bid as many numbers as she wants. The lowest unique bid wins the…
We consider descending price auctions for selling $m$ units of a good to unit demand i.i.d. buyers where there is an exogenous bound of $k$ on the number of price levels the auction clock can take. The auctioneer's problem is to choose…
We initiate the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. Our surplus-equitable mechanism is…
In contextual dynamic pricing, a seller sequentially prices goods based on contextual information. Buyers will purchase products only if the prices are below their valuations. The goal of the seller is to design a pricing strategy that…
Revenue-optimal auction design is a challenging problem with significant theoretical and practical implications. Sequential auction mechanisms, known for their simplicity and strong strategyproofness guarantees, are often limited by…
We present different versions of a conjecture which would express that first price mechanisms never work very badly in a very general class of problems. The definitions include most of the problems where there is a principal (seller) who…
A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions with budget constraints. In each period, the decision maker needs to submit a bid to win the auction and maximize the total collected reward, subject to…
We consider a mechanism design problem for energy procurement, when there is one buyer and one seller, and the buyer is the mechanism designer. The seller can generate energy from conventional (deterministic) and renewable (random) plants,…
In this paper, we investigate the computation of second-price pacing equilibria (SPPEs), a foundational model in online advertising auctions. We present a polynomial-time algorithm for computing exact SPPEs in instances with a constant…
We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…
Throttling is a popular method of budget management for online ad auctions in which the platform modulates the participation probability of an advertiser in order to smoothly spend her budget across many auctions. In this work, we…
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…
We study the optimal placement of advertisements for interactive platforms like conversational AI assistants. Importantly, conversations add a feature absent in canonical search markets -- time. The evolution of a conversation is…
We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…
We study optimal auction design in an independent private values environment where bidders can endogenously -- but at a cost -- improve information about their own valuations. The optimal mechanism is two-stage: at stage-1 bidders register…
I construct a novel random double auction as a robust bilateral trading mechanism for a profit-maximizing intermediary who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. It works as follows. The intermediary publicly commits to charging a…
In the multi-unit pricing problem, multiple units of a single item are for sale. A buyer's valuation for $n$ units of the item is $v \min \{ n, d\} $, where the per unit valuation $v$ and the capacity $d$ are private information of the…
It is well-known that optimal (i.e., revenue-maximizing) selling mechanisms in multidimensional type spaces may involve randomization. We obtain conditions under which deterministic mechanisms are optimal for selling two identical,…
An auction house cannot generally provide the optimal auction technology to every client. Instead it provides one or several auction technologies, and clients select the most appropriate one. For example, eBay provides ascending auctions…