Related papers: A Note on the Gains from Trade of the Random-Offer…
We study the two-agent single-item bilateral trade. Ideally, the trade should happen whenever the buyer's value for the item exceeds the seller's cost. However, the classical result of Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that no mechanism can…
We study the social efficiency of bilateral trade between a seller and a buyer. In the classical Bayesian setting, the celebrated Myerson-Satterthwaite impossibility theorem states that no Bayesian incentive-compatible, individually…
The celebrated Myerson--Satterthwaite theorem shows that in bilateral trade, no mechanism can be simultaneously fully efficient, Bayesian incentive compatible (BIC), and budget balanced (BB). This naturally raises the question of how…
We study bilateral trade between two strategic agents. The celebrated result of Myerson and Satterthwaite states that in general, no incentive-compatible, individually rational and weakly budget balanced mechanism can be efficient. I.e., no…
We design simple mechanisms to approximate the Gains from Trade (GFT) in two-sided markets with multiple unit-supply sellers and multiple unit-demand buyers. A classical impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that even…
We study the bilateral trade problem where a seller owns a single indivisible item, and a potential buyer seeks to purchase it. Previous mechanisms for this problem only considered the case where the values of the buyer and the seller are…
Bilateral trade is a fundamental economic scenario comprising a strategically acting buyer and seller, each holding valuations for the item, drawn from publicly known distributions. A mechanism is supposed to facilitate trade between these…
The seminal impossibility result of Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) states that for bilateral trade, there is no mechanism that is individually rational (IR), incentive compatible (IC), weakly budget balanced, and efficient. This has led…
We provide a geometric proof that the random proposer mechanism is a $4$-approximation to the first-best gains from trade in bilateral exchange. We then refine this geometric analysis to recover the state-of-the-art approximation ratio of…
We continue the study of the performance for fixed-price mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem, and improve approximation ratios of welfare-optimal mechanisms in several settings. Specifically, in the case where only the buyer…
We consider a model of bilateral trade with private values. The value of the buyer and the cost of the seller are jointly distributed. The true joint distribution is unknown to the designer, however, the marginal distributions of the value…
We consider the problem of maximizing the gains from trade (GFT) in two-sided markets. The seminal impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite shows that even for bilateral trade, there is no individually rational (IR), Bayesian…
We study bilateral trade with a broker, where a buyer and seller interact exclusively through the broker. The broker strategically maximizes her payoff through arbitrage by trading with the buyer and seller at different prices. We study…
A seminal theorem of Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) proves that, in a game of bilateral trade between a single buyer and a single seller, no mechanism can be simultaneously individually-rational, budget-balanced, incentive-compatible and…
We investigate the power of randomness in the context of a fundamental Bayesian optimal mechanism design problem--a single seller aims to maximize expected revenue by allocating multiple kinds of resources to "unit-demand" agents with…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
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…
We study the problem of social welfare maximization in bilateral trade, where two agents, a buyer and a seller, trade an indivisible item. We consider arguably the simplest form of mechanisms -- the fixed-price mechanisms, where the…
We consider the impact of fairness requirements on the social efficiency of truthful mechanisms for trade, focusing on Bayesian bilateral-trade settings. Unlike the full information case in which all gains-from-trade can be realized and…
Designing revenue optimal auctions for selling an item to $n$ symmetric bidders is a fundamental problem in mechanism design. Myerson (1981) shows that the second price auction with an appropriate reserve price is optimal when bidders'…