Related papers: Risk-Free Bidding in Complement-Free Combinatorial…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
Sellers often prescreen potential bidders, restricting participation to a select group of capable participants. Recent advances in machine learning and generative AI make this strategy increasingly viable by enabling the cost-effective…
We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $m$ heterogeneous items and a single buyer whose valuation $v$ for the items may exhibit both substitutes (i.e., for some $S, T$, $v(S \cup T) < v(S) + v(T)$) and complements (i.e., for some $S,…
A seller chooses a reserve price in a second-price auction to maximize worst-case expected revenue when she knows only the mean of value distribution and an upper bound on either values themselves or variance. Values are private and iid.…
We introduce draft auctions, which is a sequential auction format where at each iteration players bid for the right to buy items at a fixed price. We show that draft auctions offer an exponential improvement in social welfare at equilibrium…
We study anonymous posted price mechanisms for combinatorial auctions in a Bayesian framework. In a posted price mechanism, item prices are posted, then the consumers approach the seller sequentially in an arbitrary order, each purchasing…
We study the optimal auction design problem when bidders' preferences follow the maxmin expected utility model. We suppose that each bidder's set of priors consists of beliefs close to the seller's belief, where "closeness" is defined by a…
A seller wants to sell an item to $n$ buyers. Buyer valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution unknown to the seller; the seller only knows that the support is included in $[a, b]$. To be robust, the seller chooses a DSIC mechanism…
In an all-pay auction, only one bidder wins but all bidders must pay the auctioneer. All-pay bidding games arise from attaching a similar bidding structure to traditional combinatorial games to determine which player moves next. In contrast…
A seller sells an object over time but is uncertain how the buyer learns their willingness-to-pay. We consider informational robustness under \textit{limited commitment}, where the seller offers a price \textit{each period} to maximize…
A speculator can take advantage of a procurement auction by acquiring items for sale before the auction. The accumulated market power can then be exercised in the auction and may lead to a large enough gain to cover the acquisition costs. I…
Inspired by Internet ad auction applications, we study the problem of allocating a single item via an auction when bidders place very different values on the item. We formulate this as the problem of prior-free auction and focus on…
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…
Recently the online advertising market has exhibited a gradual shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions. Although there has been a line of works concerning online bidding strategies in first-price auctions, it still remains…
We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…
Bid shading has become a standard practice in the digital advertising industry, in which most auctions for advertising (ad) opportunities are now of first price type. Given an ad opportunity, performing bid shading requires estimating not…
We study the problem of auction design for advertising platforms that face strategic advertisers who are bidding across platforms. Each advertiser's goal is to maximize their total value or conversions while satisfying some constraint(s)…
We examine ``tournament'' second-price auctions in which $N$ bidders compete for the right to participate in a second stage and contend against bidder $N+1$. When the first $N$ bidders are committed so that their bids cannot be changed in…
Revealed preference techniques are used to test whether a data set is compatible with rational behaviour. They are also incorporated as constraints in mechanism design to encourage truthful behaviour in applications such as combinatorial…
With spectrum auctions as our prime motivation, in this paper we analyze combinatorial auctions where agents' valuations exhibit complementarities. Assuming that the agents only value bundles of size at most $k$ and also assuming that we…