Related papers: Beckmann's approach to multi-item multi-bidder auc…
In a sequential auction with multiple bidding agents, it is highly challenging to determine the ordering of the items to sell in order to maximize the revenue due to the fact that the autonomy and private information of the agents heavily…
Classical Bayesian mechanism design relies on the common prior assumption, but such prior is often not available in practice. We study the design of prior-independent mechanisms that relax this assumption: the seller is selling an…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
Online auctions are one of the most fundamental facets of the modern economy and power an industry generating hundreds of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Auction theory has historically focused on the question of designing the best…
Over the past few years, more and more Internet advertisers have started using automated bidding for optimizing their advertising campaigns. Such advertisers have an optimization goal (e.g. to maximize conversions), and some constraints…
We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue,…
We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…
In a seminal paper, McAfee (1992) presented the first dominant strategy truthful mechanism for double auction. His mechanism attains nearly optimal gain-from-trade when the market is sufficiently large. However, his mechanism may leave…
Assortment optimization concerns the problem of selling items with fixed prices to a buyer who will purchase at most one. Typically, retailers select a subset of items, corresponding to an "assortment" of brands to carry, and make each…
We study auction design in the celebrated interdependence model introduced by Milgrom and Weber [1982], where a mechanism designer allocates a good, maximizing the value of the agent who receives it, while inducing truthfulness using…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
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 provide a constructive proof of Border's theorem [Bor91, HR15a] and its generalization to reduced-form auctions with asymmetric bidders [Bor07, MV10, CKM13]. Given a reduced form, we identify a subset of Border constraints that are…
Multi-unit auctions are a paradigmatic model, where a seller brings multiple units of a good, while several buyers bring monetary endowments. It is well known that Walrasian equilibria do not always exist in this model, however compelling…
In a single-parameter mechanism design problem, a provider is looking to sell a service to a group of potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ has a private value $v_i$ for receiving the service and a feasibility constraint restricts which sets of…
We study a real-time bidding problem resulting from a set of contractual obligations stipulating that a firm win a specified number of heterogeneous impressions or ad placements over a defined duration in a real-time auction. The contracts…
We study multi-marginal optimal transport problems from a probabilistic graphical model perspective. We point out an elegant connection between the two when the underlying cost for optimal transport allows a graph structure. In particular,…
Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to possess…
We provide a unified view of many recent developments in Bayesian mechanism design, including the black-box reductions of Cai et al. [CDW13b], simple auctions for additive buyers [HN12], and posted-price mechanisms for unit-demand bidders…
The enhanced competition paradigm is an attempt at bridging the gap between simple and optimal auctions. In this line of work, given an auction setting with $m$ items and $n$ bidders, the goal is to find the smallest $n' \geq n$ such that…