Related papers: Is Selling Complete Information (Approximately) Op…
The model of a non-Bayesian agent who faces a repeated game with incomplete information against Nature is an appropriate tool for modeling general agent-environment interactions. In such a model the environment state (controlled by Nature)…
We study allocation problems without monetary transfers where agents have correlated types, i.e., hold private information about one another. Such peer information is relevant in various settings, including science funding, allocation of…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
Two sellers compete to sell identical products to a single buyer. Each seller chooses an arbitrary mechanism, possibly involving lotteries, to sell their product. The utility-maximizing buyer can choose to participate in one or both…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
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…
We study a dynamic model of information provision. A state of nature evolves according to a Markov chain. An informed advisor decides how much information to provide to an uninformed decision maker, so as to influence his short-term…
A network of agents attempt to learn some unknown state of the world drawn by nature from a finite set. Agents observe private signals conditioned on the true state, and form beliefs about the unknown state accordingly. Each agent may face…
We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…
We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…
A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct…
We study market interactions in which buyers are allowed to credibly reveal partial information about their types to the seller. Previous recent work has studied the special case of one buyer and one good, showing that such communication…
We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be…
Maximizing the revenue from selling _more than one_ good (or item) to a single buyer is a notoriously difficult problem, in stark contrast to the one-good case. For two goods, we show that simple "one-dimensional" mechanisms, such as…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
We study the bilateral trade problem: one seller, one buyer and a single, indivisible item for sale. It is well known that there is no fully-efficient and incentive compatible mechanism for this problem that maintains a balanced budget. We…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
There has been a recent surge of interest in the role of information in strategic interactions. Much of this work seeks to understand how the realized equilibrium of a game is influenced by uncertainty in the environment and the information…
How to optimally persuade an agent who has a private type? When elicitation is feasible, this amounts to a fairly standard principal-agent-style mechanism design problem, where the persuader employs a mechanism to first elicit the agent's…