Related papers: How To Sell (or Procure) in a Sequential Auction

We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…

We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…

Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…

In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product,…

We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this class,…

In many settings agents participate in multiple different auctions that are not necessarily implemented simultaneously. Future opportunities affect strategic considerations of the players in each auction, introducing externalities.…

A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…

We introduce a new numerical framework to learn optimal bidding strategies in repeated auctions when the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. Crucially, we do not assume that the bidders know what optimization mechanism is used…

We provide a characterization of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanisms in settings where a monopolist sells k items over k periods to a buyer who realizes his value for item i in the beginning of period i. We require that the mechanism…

We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…

The declining price anomaly states that the price weakly decreases when multiple copies of an item are sold sequentially over time. The anomaly has been observed in a plethora of practical applications. On the theoretical side, Gale and…

This paper studies some basic problems in a multiple-object auction model using methodologies from theoretical computer science. We are especially concerned with situations where an adversary bidder knows the bidding algorithms of all the…

Many online companies sell advertisement space in second-price auctions with reserve. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic method to learn a profitable strategy to set the reserve price. We use historical auction data with features to…

A common practice in many auctions is to offer bidders an opportunity to improve their bids, known as a Best and Final Offer (BAFO) stage. This final bid can depend on new information provided about either the asset or the competitors. This…

We model a procurement scenario in which two \textit{imperfect} bidders act simultaneously on behalf of a single buyer, a configuration common in display advertising and referred to as \textit{side-by-side bidding} but largely unexplored in…

Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…

We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…

I consider a mechanism design problem of selling multiple goods to multiple bidders when the designer has minimal amount of information. I assume that the designer only knows the upper bounds of bidders' values for each good and has no…

This note pursues two primary objectives. First, we analyze the outcomes of an all-pay auction within a store where buyers with and without financial constraints arrive at varying rates, and where buyer types are private information.…

We study the problem of selling a resource through an auction mechanism. The winning buyer in turn develops this resource to generate profit. Two forms of payment are considered: charging the winning buyer a one-time payment, or an initial…