Related papers: Approximately Efficient Bilateral Trade
We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed…
A speculative agent with Prospect Theory preference chooses the optimal time to purchase and then to sell an indivisible risky asset to maximize the expected utility of the round-trip profit net of transaction costs. The optimization…
We consider the classical mathematical economics problem of {\em Bayesian optimal mechanism design} where a principal aims to optimize expected revenue when allocating resources to self-interested agents with preferences drawn from a known…
A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…
We study the stable marriage problem in the partial information setting where the agents, although they have an underlying true strict linear order, are allowed to specify partial orders. Specifically, we focus on the case where the agents…
The Walras approach to equilibrium focuses on the existence of market prices at which the total demands for goods are matched by the total supplies. Trading activities that might identify such prices by bringing agents together as potential…
We propose two solution concepts for matchings under preferences: robustness and near stability. The former strengthens while the latter relaxes the classic definition of stability by Gale and Shapley (1962). Informally speaking, robustness…
Obvious strategyproofness (OSP) is an appealing concept as it allows to maintain incentive compatibility even in the presence of agents that are not fully rational, e.g., those who struggle with contingent reasoning [Li, 2015]. However, it…
Stable matching is a fundamental area with many practical applications, such as centralised clearinghouses for school choice or job markets. Recent work has introduced the paradigm of near-feasibility in capacitated matching settings, where…
We investigate activities that have different periods of duration. We define the profit intensity as a measure of this economic category. The profit intensity in a repeated trading has a unique property of attaining its maximum at a fixed…
We study online bilateral trade, where a learner facilitates repeated exchanges between a buyer and a seller to maximize the Gain From Trade (GFT), i.e., the social welfare. In doing so, the learner must guarantee not to subsidize the…
We consider a fundamental problem in microeconomics: selling a single item to a number of potential buyers, whose values are drawn from known independent and regular (not necessarily identical) distributions. There are four widely-used and…
Correlated equilibria enable a coordinator to influence the self-interested agents by recommending actions that no player has an incentive to deviate from. However, the effectiveness of this mechanism relies on accurate knowledge of the…
The first-price auction is popular in practice for its simplicity and transparency. Moreover, its potential virtues grow in complex settings where incentive compatible auctions may generate little or no revenue. Unfortunately, the…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
We give a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the asymmetric traveling salesman problem (ATSP). Our approximation guarantee is analyzed with respect to the standard LP relaxation, and thus our result confirms the conjectured…
Fair allocation of indivisible goods has attracted extensive attention over the last two decades, yielding numerous elegant algorithmic results and producing challenging open questions. The problem becomes much harder in the presence of…
As computational agents are developed for increasingly complicated e-commerce applications, the complexity of the decisions they face demands advances in artificial intelligence techniques. For example, an agent representing a seller in an…
We provide a new, much simplified and straightforward proof to a result of Pavlov [2011] regarding the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling two goods with uniformly i.i.d. valuations over intervals $[c,c+1]$, to an additive buyer. This…
We study the communication complexity of dominant strategy implementations of combinatorial auctions. We start with two domains that are generally considered "easy": multi-unit auctions with decreasing marginal values and combinatorial…