Related papers: Information-Robust Optimal Auctions
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
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.…
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 study the design of auctions in which the auctioneer is assumed to have information only about the marginal distribution of a generic bidder's valuation, but does not know the correlation structure of the joint distribution of bidders'…
Designing revenue optimal auctions for selling an item to $n$ symmetric bidders is a fundamental problem in mechanism design. Myerson (1981) shows that the second price auction with an appropriate reserve price is optimal when bidders'…
We study revenue optimization learning algorithms for repeated second-price auctions with reserve where a seller interacts with multiple strategic bidders each of which holds a fixed private valuation for a good and seeks to maximize his…
We study auction design when a seller relies on machine-learning predictions of bidders' valuations that may be unreliable. Motivated by modern ML systems that are often accurate but occasionally fail in a way that is essentially…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…
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…
A common practice in many auctions is to offer bidders an opportunity to improve their bids, known as a Best and Final Offer (BAFO) stage. This final bid can depend on new information provided about either the asset or the competitors. This…
In a multiple-object auction, every bidder tries to win as many objects as possible with a bidding algorithm. This paper studies position-randomized auctions, which form a special class of multiple-object auctions where a bidding algorithm…
Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…
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…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
I construct a novel random double auction as a robust bilateral trading mechanism for a profit-maximizing intermediary who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. It works as follows. The intermediary publicly commits to charging a…
We study multi-unit auctions in which bidders have limited knowledge of opponent strategies and values. We characterize optimal prior-free bids; these bids minimize the maximal loss in expected utility resulting from uncertainty surrounding…
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…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
We consider the problem of the optimization of bidding strategies in prior-dependent revenue-maximizing auctions, when the seller fixes the reserve prices based on the bid distributions. Our study is done in the setting where one bidder is…
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…