Related papers: Computing Simple Mechanisms: Lift-and-Round over M…
Auctions are widely used in exchanges to match buy and sell requests. Once the buyers and sellers place their requests, the exchange determines how these requests are to be matched. The two most popular objectives used while determining the…
One of the most celebrated results in mechanism design is Myerson's characterization of the revenue optimal auction for selling a single item. However, this result relies heavily on the assumption that buyers are indifferent to risk. In…
The competition complexity of an auction setting is the number of additional bidders needed such that the simple mechanism of selling items separately (with additional bidders) achieves greater revenue than the optimal but complex…
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…
We revisit the problem of designing the profit-maximizing single-item auction, solved by Myerson in his seminal paper for the case in which bidder valuations are independently distributed. We focus on general joint distributions, seeking…
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…
In the Bidder Selection Problem (BSP) there is a large pool of $n$ potential advertisers competing for ad slots on the user's web page. Due to strict computational restrictions, the advertising platform can run a proper auction only for a…
Aiming to overcome some of the limitations of worst-case analysis, the recently proposed framework of "algorithms with predictions" allows algorithms to be augmented with a (possibly erroneous) machine-learned prediction that they can use…
Myerson's seminal characterization of the revenue-optimal auction for a single item \cite{myerson1981optimal} remains a cornerstone of mechanism design. However, generalizing this framework to multi-item settings has proven exceptionally…
We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a…
Developing efficient sequential bidding strategies for repeated auctions is an important practical challenge in various marketing tasks. In this setting, the bidding agent obtains information, on both the value of the item at sale and the…
In a single-parameter mechanism design problem, a provider is looking to sell a service to a group of potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ has a private value $v_i$ for receiving the service and a feasibility constraint restricts which sets of…
We study probabilistic single-item second-price auctions where the item is characterized by a set of attributes. The auctioneer knows the actual instantiation of all the attributes, but he may choose to reveal only a subset of these…
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
We consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…
We consider the well known, and notoriously difficult, problem of a single revenue-maximizing seller selling two or more heterogeneous goods to a single buyer whose private values for the goods are drawn from a (possibly correlated) known…
In this paper, we introduce a novel approach for reducing the $k$-item $n$-bidder auction with additive valuation to $k$-item $1$-bidder auctions. This approach, called the \emph{Best-Guess} reduction, can be applied to address several…
We study individual rational, Pareto optimal, and incentive compatible mechanisms for auctions with heterogeneous items and budget limits. For multi-dimensional valuations we show that there can be no deterministic mechanism with these…
In budget-feasible mechanism design, a buyer wishes to procure a set of items of maximum value from self-interested players. We have a valuation function $v:2^U \to \mathbb{R}_+$, where $U$ is the set of all items, where $v(S)$ specifies…
We consider the problem of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanism design in settings where agents' types evolve over time as a function of their (both public and private) experience with items that are auctioned repeatedly over an infinite…