Related papers: How To Sell (or Procure) in a Sequential Auction
We are interested in mechanisms that maximize social welfare. In [1] this problem was studied for multi-unit auctions with unit demand bidders and for the public project problem, and in each case social welfare undominated mechanisms in the…
In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…
We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…
A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…
Second-price auctions with deposits are frequently used in blockchain environments. An auction takes place on-chain: bidders deposit an amount that fully covers their bid (but possibly exceeds it) in a smart contract. The deposit is used as…
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…
The goal of an auction is to determine commodity prices such that all participants are perfectly happy. Such a solution is called a competitive equilibrium and does not exist in general. For this reason we are interested in solutions which…
The standard framework of online bidding algorithm design assumes that the seller commits himself to faithfully implementing the rules of the adopted auction. However, the seller may attempt to cheat in execution to increase his revenue if…
We study the revenue performance of sequential posted price mechanisms and some natural extensions, for a general setting where the valuations of the buyers are drawn from a correlated distribution. Sequential posted price mechanisms are…
Recurring auctions are ubiquitous for selling durable assets like artworks and homes, with follow-up auctions held for unsold items. We investigate such auctions theoretically and empirically. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
We consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not only to the…
Classical Bayesian mechanism design relies on the common prior assumption, but such prior is often not available in practice. We study the design of prior-independent mechanisms that relax this assumption: the seller is selling an…
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…
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…
In a sequential auction with multiple bidding agents, it is highly challenging to determine the ordering of the items to sell in order to maximize the revenue due to the fact that the autonomy and private information of the agents heavily…
We provide sufficient conditions for revenue maximization in a two-good monopoly where the buyer's values for the items come from independent (but not necessarily identical) distributions over bounded intervals. Under certain distributional…
We present a quantum auction protocol using superpositions to represent bids and distributed search to identify the winner(s). Measuring the final quantum state gives the auction outcome while simultaneously destroying the superposition.…
We study auctions that are robust at any scale, i.e., they can be applied to sell both expensive and cheap items and achieve the best multiplicative approximations of the optimal revenue in the worst case. We show that the optimal mechanism…
On ad exchange platforms the place for advertisement is sold through different kinds of auctions. However, it is not uncommon the situation where the seller repeatedly encounters only one buyer, thus the posted price auction degenerates…