Related papers: Improved Approximation to First-Best Gains-from-Tr…
We study a natural combinatorial pricing problem for sequentially arriving buyers with equal budgets. Each buyer is interested in exactly one pair of items and purchases this pair if and only if, upon arrival, both items are still available…
This paper reexamines the classic problem of revenue maximization in single-item auctions with $n$ buyers under the lens of the robust optimization framework. The celebrated Myerson's mechanism is the format that maximizes the seller's…
A special case of Myerson's classic result describes the revenue-optimal equilibrium when a seller offers a single item to a buyer. We study a repeated sales extension of this model: a seller offers to sell a single fresh copy of an item to…
One of the most celebrated results in mechanism design is Myerson's characterization of the revenue optimal auction for selling a single item. However, this result relies heavily on the assumption that buyers are indifferent to risk. In…
We study truthful mechanisms for approximating the Maximin-Share (MMS) allocation of agents with additive valuations for indivisible goods. Algorithmically, constant factor approximations exist for the problem for any number of agents. When…
We study revenue optimization pricing algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation. We show that, in the case when both the seller and the buyer…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…
We efficiently solve the optimal multi-dimensional mechanism design problem for independent bidders with arbitrary demand constraints when either the number of bidders is a constant or the number of items is a constant. In the first…
In practice, most mechanisms for selling, buying, matching, voting, and so on are not incentive compatible. We present techniques for estimating how far a mechanism is from incentive compatible. Given samples from the agents' type…
The Generalized Second Price auction is the primary method by which sponsered search advertisements are sold. We study the performance of this auction under various equilibrium concepts. In particular, we demonstrate that the Bayesian Price…
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…
Maximizing the revenue from selling _more than one_ good (or item) to a single buyer is a notoriously difficult problem, in stark contrast to the one-good case. For two goods, we show that simple "one-dimensional" mechanisms, such as…
We study the performance of anonymous posted-price selling mechanisms for a standard Bayesian auction setting, where $n$ bidders have i.i.d. valuations for a single item. We show that for the natural class of Monotone Hazard Rate (MHR)…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
In this work we are concerned with the design of efficient mechanisms while eliciting limited information from the agents. First, we study the performance of sampling approximations in facility location games. Our key result is to show that…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
We provide sufficient conditions for revenue maximization in a two-good monopoly where the buyer's values for the items come from independent (but not necessarily identical) distributions over bounded intervals. Under certain distributional…
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…
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…