Related papers: Speculation in Procurement Auctions
Shilling is the use of artificial bids to make competition appear stronger and push prices upward. We study repeated first-price auctions in which shilling affects feedback but not allocation: the learner wins or loses against the real…
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 analyze a scenario in which software agents implemented as regret-minimizing algorithms engage in a repeated auction on behalf of their users. We study first-price and second-price auctions, as well as their generalized versions (e.g.,…
This paper studies inference in first-price and second-price sealed-bid auctions with many bidders, using an asymptotic framework where the number of bidders increases while the number of auctions remains fixed. Our approach enables…
Auction theories are believed to provide a better selling opportunity for the resources to be allocated. Various organizations have taken measures to increase trust among participants towards their auction system, but trust alone cannot…
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 consider an environment where sellers compete over buyers. All sellers are a-priori identical and strategically signal buyers about the product they sell. In a setting motivated by on-line advertising in display ad exchanges, where firms…
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this…
We study the optimal placement of advertisements for interactive platforms like conversational AI assistants. Importantly, conversations add a feature absent in canonical search markets -- time. The evolution of a conversation is…
In economics, there are many ways to describe the interaction between a "seller" and a "buyer". The most common one, with which we interact almost every day, is selling for a fixed price. This option is perfect for selling a mass product,…
Sequential auctions for identical items with unit-demand, private-value buyers are common and often occur periodically without end, as new bidders replace departing ones. We model bidder uncertainty by introducing a probability that a…
A prevalent assumption in auction theory is that the auctioneer has full control over the market and that the allocation she dictates is final. In practice, however, agents might be able to resell acquired items in an aftermarket. A…
In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…
We propose and estimate a model of demand and supply of annuities. To this end, we use rich data from Chile, where annuities are bought and sold in a private market via a two-stage process: first-price auctions followed by bargaining. We…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
We present different versions of a conjecture which would express that first price mechanisms never work very badly in a very general class of problems. The definitions include most of the problems where there is a principal (seller) who…
We study risk-free bidding strategies in combinatorial auctions with incomplete information. Specifically, what is the maximum profit that a complement-free (subadditive) bidder can guarantee in a multi-item combinatorial auction? Suppose…
Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…
In digital goods auctions, there is an auctioneer who sells an item with unlimited supply to a set of potential buyers, and the objective is to design truthful auction to maximize the total profit of the auctioneer. Motivated from an…
Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…