Related papers: Speculation in Procurement Auctions
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bids reach the seller directly. We study how this picture changes when a revenue-maximizing intermediary controls access to the seller's auction. Motivated by blockchain auctions, online…
Online advertising banners are sold in real-time through auctions.Typically, the more banners a user is shown, the smaller the marginalvalue of the next banner for this user is. This fact can be detected bybasic ML models, that can be used…
We consider a repeated auction where the buyer's utility for an item depends on the time that elapsed since his last purchase. We present an algorithm to build the optimal bidding policy, and then, because optimal might be impractical, we…
It is well known that rightly applied reverse auctions offer big commercial potential to procurement departments. However, the sheer number of auction types often overwhelms users in practice. And since the implications of a wrongly chosen…
This paper studies a simplicity notion in a mechanism design setting in which agents do not necessarily share a common prior. I develop a model in which agents participate in a prior-free game of (coarse) information acquisition followed by…
Information is replicable in that it can be simultaneously consumed and sold to others. We study how resale affects a decentralized market for information. We show that even if the initial seller is an informational monopolist, she captures…
The progressive second-price auction of Lazar and Semret is a decentralized mechanism for the allocation and real-time pricing of a divisible resource. Our focus is on how delays in the receipt of bid messages, asynchronous analysis by…
In many auctions, bidders may be reluctant to reveal private information to the auctioneer and other bidders. Among deterministic bilateral communication protocols, reducing what bidders learn requires increasing what the auctioneer learns.…
The planner wants to give k identical, indivisible objects to the top k valuation agents at zero costs. Each agent knows her own valuation of the object and whether it is among the top k. Modify the (k+1)st-price sealed-bid auction by…
I consider a mechanism design problem of selling multiple goods to multiple bidders when the designer has minimal amount of information. I assume that the designer only knows the upper bounds of bidders' values for each good and has no…
While auction theory views bids and valuations as continuous variables, real-world auctions are necessarily discrete. In this paper, we use a combination of analytical and computational methods to investigate whether incorporating…
We study auctions that are robust at any scale, i.e., they can be applied to sell both expensive and cheap items and achieve the best multiplicative approximations of the optimal revenue in the worst case. We show that the optimal mechanism…
The Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction used typically to model sponsored search auctions does not include the notion of budget constraints, which is present in practice. Motivated by this, we introduce the different variants of GSP…
In online advertising, a set of potential advertisements can be ranked by a certain auction system where usually the top-1 advertisement would be selected and displayed at an advertising space. In this paper, we show a selection bias issue…
Simultaneous item auctions are simple procedures for allocating items to bidders with potentially complex preferences over different item sets. In a simultaneous auction, every bidder submits bids on all items simultaneously. The allocation…
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…
In markets such as digital advertising auctions, bidders want to maximize value rather than payoff. This is different to the utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes. We refer to…
We focus on online second price auctions, where bids are made sequentially, and the winning bidder pays the maximum of the second-highest bid and a seller specified starting price. For many such auctions, the seller does not see all the…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…