Related papers: Estimation of Standard Auction Models
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…
In this work, we study spectrum auction problem where each request from secondary users has spatial, temporal, and spectral features. With the requests of secondary users and the reserve price of the primary user, our goal is to design…
Auction is applied for trade with various mechanisms. A simple but practical question is which mechanism, typically first-price or second-price auctions, is preferred from the perspective of bidders or sellers. A celebrated answer is…
We consider the problem of computing a (pure) Bayes-Nash equilibrium in the first-price auction with continuous value distributions and discrete bidding space. We prove that when bidders have independent subjective prior beliefs about the…
We propose a novel statistical learning method for multi-item auctions that incorporates credible intervals. Our approach employs nonparametric density estimation to estimate credible intervals for bidder types based on historical data. We…
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…
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…
Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…
We provide algorithms that learn simple auctions whose revenue is approximately optimal in multi-item multi-bidder settings, for a wide range of valuations including unit-demand, additive, constrained additive, XOS, and subadditive. We…
The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
We consider auction environments in which at the time of the auction bidders observe signals about their ex-post value. We introduce a model of novice bidders who do not know know the joint distribution of signals and instead build a…
A seller chooses a reserve price in a second-price auction to maximize worst-case expected revenue when she knows only the mean of value distribution and an upper bound on either values themselves or variance. Values are private and iid.…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
In the standard single-dimensional model of position auctions, bidders agree on the relative values of the positions and each of them submits a single bid that is interpreted in terms of these values. Motivated by current practice in…
We study the complexity of computing Bayes-Nash equilibria in single-item first-price auctions. We present the first efficient algorithms for the problem, when the bidders' values for the item are independently drawn from the same…
The main goal of this paper is to develop a theory of inference of player valuations from observed data in the generalized second price auction without relying on the Nash equilibrium assumption. Existing work in Economics on inferring…
We study the equilibria of uniform price auctions where many asymmetric bidders have flat demands up to their respective quantity constraints. We present an iterative procedure that systematically finds an equilibrium outcome as well as an…
We consider the computational complexity of computing Bayes-Nash equilibria in first-price auctions, where the bidders' values for the item are drawn from a general (possibly correlated) joint distribution. We show that when the values and…
We initiate the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. Our surplus-equitable mechanism is…