Related papers: Speculation in Procurement Auctions
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
We consider a setting in which bidders participate in multiple auctions run by different sellers, and optimize their bids for the \emph{aggregate} auction. We analyze this setting by formulating a game between sellers, where a seller's…
Auctions are markets with strict regulations governing the information available to traders in the market and the possible actions they can take. Since well designed auctions achieve desirable economic outcomes, they have been widely used…
We study a setting where agents use no-regret learning algorithms to participate in repeated auctions. \citet{kolumbus2022auctions} showed, rather surprisingly, that when bidders participate in second-price auctions using no-regret bidding…
High-stakes auctions are often preceded by nonbinding communication between bidders and the seller. Motivated by these practices, this paper examines a two-period model in which two bidders send private cheap talk messages to the seller…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
First-price auctions have many desirable properties, including uniquely possessing some, like credibility. However, first-price auctions are also inherently non-truthful, and non-truthfulness may result in instability and inefficiencies.…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…
How should a buyer design procurement mechanisms when suppliers' costs are unknown, and the buyer does not have a prior belief? We demonstrate that simple mechanisms - that share a constant fraction of the buyer utility with the seller -…
In many online advertisement (ad) exchanges, ad slots are each sold via a separate second-price auction. This paper considers the bidder's problem of maximizing the value of ads they purchase in these auctions, subject to budget…
With the increasing use of auctions in online advertising, there has been a large effort to study seller revenue maximization, following Myerson's seminal work, both theoretically and practically. We take the point of view of the buyer in…
I establish nonparametric identification results in first- and second-price auctions when transaction prices are truncated by a binding reserve price under a range of information structures. When the number of potential bidders is fixed and…
We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…
This letter considers the design of an auction mechanism to sell the object of a seller when the buyers quantize their private value estimates regarding the object prior to communicating them to the seller. The designed auction mechanism…
Many early order flow auction designs handle the payment for orders when they execute on the chain rather than when they are won in the auction. Payments in these auctions only take place when the orders are executed, creating a free option…
As computational agents are developed for increasingly complicated e-commerce applications, the complexity of the decisions they face demands advances in artificial intelligence techniques. For example, an agent representing a seller in an…
Investigating potential purchases is often a substantial investment under uncertainty. Standard market designs, such as simultaneous or English auctions, compound this with uncertainty about the price a bidder will have to pay in order to…
We examine trade-offs among stakeholders in ad auctions. Our metrics are the revenue for the utility of the auctioneer, the number of clicks for the utility of the users and the welfare for the utility of the advertisers. We show how to…
Mature internet advertising platforms offer high-level campaign management tools to help advertisers run their campaigns, often abstracting away the intricacies of how each ad is placed and focusing on aggregate metrics of interest to…