Related papers: Auctioning Multiple Goods without Priors
Most microeconomic models of interest involve optimizing a piecewise linear function. These include contract design in hidden-action principal-agent problems, selling an item in posted-price auctions, and bidding in first-price auctions.…
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…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
We propose and study a novel mechanism design setup where each bidder holds two kinds of private information: (1) type variable, which can be misreported; (2) information variable, which the bidder may want to conceal or partially reveal,…
Consider a trade market with one seller and multiple buyers. The seller aims to sell an indivisible item and maximize their revenue. This paper focuses on a simple and popular mechanism--the fixed-price mechanism. Unlike the standard…
Single-shot auctions are commonly used as a means to sell goods, for example when selling ad space or allocating radio frequencies, however devising mechanisms for auctions with multiple bidders and multiple items can be complicated. It has…
The connection between games and no-regret algorithms has been widely studied in the literature. A fundamental result is that when all players play no-regret strategies, this produces a sequence of actions whose time-average is a…
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…
There is only one technique for prior-free optimal mechanism design that generalizes beyond the structurally benevolent setting of digital goods. This technique uses random sampling to estimate the distribution of agent values and then…
In practice, auction data are often endogenously censored and anonymous, revealing only limited outcome statistics rather than full bid profiles. We study robust auction design when the seller observes only aggregated, anonymous order…
In online marketplaces, customers have access to hundreds of reviews for a single product. Buyers often use reviews from other customers that share their type -- such as height for clothing, skin type for skincare products, and location for…
We study revenue optimization learning algorithms for posted-price auctions with strategic buyers. We analyze a very broad family of monotone regret minimization algorithms for this problem, which includes the previously best known…
This paper studies mechanism design for auctions with externalities on budgets, a novel setting where the budgets that bidders commit are adjusted due to the externality of the competitors' allocation outcomes-a departure from traditional…
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…
Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…
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,…
A large fraction of online advertisement is sold via repeated second price auctions. In these auctions, the reserve price is the main tool for the auctioneer to boost revenues. In this work, we investigate the following question: Can…
We consider the problem of an auctioneer who faces the task of selling a good (drawn from a known distribution) to a set of buyers, when the auctioneer does not have the capacity to describe to the buyers the exact identity of the good that…
We study the identification and estimation of first-price auction models where bidders have ambiguity about the valuation distribution and their preferences are represented by maxmin expected utility. When entry is exogenous, the…
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…