Related papers: Distributional Robustness: From Pricing to Auction…

Distributionally robust control is a well-studied framework for optimal decision making under uncertainty, with the objective of minimizing an expected cost function over control actions, assuming the most adverse probability distribution…

We revisit the problem of designing the profit-maximizing single-item auction, solved by Myerson in his seminal paper for the case in which bidder valuations are independently distributed. We focus on general joint distributions, seeking…

Posted price mechanisms are prevalent in allocating goods within online marketplaces due to their simplicity and practical efficiency. We explore a fundamental scenario where buyers' valuations are independent and identically distributed,…

In Bayesian single-item auctions, a monotone bidding strategy--one that prescribes a higher bid for a higher value type--can be equivalently represented as a partition of the quantile space into consecutive intervals corresponding to…

We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…

A diffusion auction refers to a selling process conducted over a social network, where each participant submits a bid and may invite other potential buyers to join the auction. Although various mechanisms have been proposed, none of them…

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) provides a framework for training machine learning models that are able to perform well on a collection of related data distributions (the "uncertainty set"). This is done by solving a min-max…

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…

This paper studies mechanism design for revenue maximization in a distribution-reporting setting, where the auctioneer does not know the buyers' true value distributions. Instead, each buyer reports and commits to a bid distribution in the…

We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be…

This paper presents a new safety specification method that is robust against errors in the probability distribution of disturbances. Our proposed distributionally robust safe policy maximizes the probability of a system remaining in a…

We study a repeated trading problem in which a mechanism designer facilitates trade between a single seller and multiple buyers. Our model generalizes the classic bilateral trade setting to a multi-buyer environment. Specifically, the…

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…

We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…

Machine learning has developed a variety of tools for learning and representing high-dimensional distributions with structure. Recent years have also seen big advances in designing multi-item mechanisms. Akin to overfitting, however, these…

We address the problem of improving bidders' strategies in prior-dependent revenue-maximizing auctions and introduce a simple and generic method to design novel bidding strategies if the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. We…

Redistribution mechanism design aims to redistribute the revenue collected by a truthful auction back to its participants without affecting the truthfulness. We study redistribution mechanisms for diffusion auctions, which is a new trend in…

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…

This study explores the design of an efficient rebate policy in auction markets, focusing on a continuous-time setting with competition among market participants. In this model, a stock exchange collects transaction fees from auction…

We initiate the study of efficient mechanism design with guaranteed good properties even when players participate in multiple different mechanisms simultaneously or sequentially. We define the class of smooth mechanisms, related to smooth…