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We study the necessity of interaction for obtaining efficient allocations in subadditive combinatorial auctions. This problem was originally introduced by Dobzinski, Nisan, and Oren (STOC'14) as the following simple market scenario: $m$…
We study the communication complexity of welfare maximization in combinatorial auctions with bidders from either a standard valuation class (which require exponential communication to explicitly state, such as subadditive or XOS), or…
We study the communication complexity of welfare maximization in combinatorial auctions with $m$ items and two subadditive bidders. A $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation can be guaranteed by a trivial randomized protocol with zero communication, or…
Complements between goods - where one good takes on added value in the presence of another - have been a thorn in the side of algorithmic mechanism designers. On the one hand, complements are common in the standard motivating applications…
We explore the approximation power of deterministic obviously strategy-proof mechanisms in auctions, where the objective is welfare maximization. A trivial ascending auction on the grand bundle guarantees an approximation of $\min\{m,n\}$…
The focus of classic mechanism design has been on truthful direct-revelation mechanisms. In the context of combinatorial auctions the truthful direct-revelation mechanism that maximizes social welfare is the VCG mechanism. For many…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
We study the fundamental, classical mechanism design problem of single-buyer multi-item Bayesian revenue-maximizing auctions under the lens of communication complexity between the buyer and the seller. Specifically, we ask whether using…
Combinatorial auctions (CA) are a well-studied area in algorithmic mechanism design. However, contrary to the standard model, empirical studies suggest that a bidder's valuation often does not depend solely on the goods assigned to him. For…
We explore the performance of polynomial-time incentive-compatible mechanisms in single-crossing domains. Single-crossing domains were extensively studied in the economics literature. Roughly speaking, a domain is single crossing if…
We study the communication complexity of incentive compatible auction-protocols between a monopolist seller and a single buyer with a combinatorial valuation function over $n$ items. Motivated by the fact that revenue-optimal auctions are…
We consider the optimization problem of a multi-resource, multi-unit VCG auction that produces an optimal, i.e., non-approximated, social welfare. We present an algorithm that solves this optimization problem with pseudo-polynomial…
Internet ad auctions have evolved from a few lines of text to richer informational layouts that include images, sitelinks, videos, etc. Ads in these new formats occupy varying amounts of space, and an advertiser can provide multiple…
We study the efficiency of simple combinatorial auctions for the allocation of a set of items to a set of agents, with private subadditive valuation functions and budget constraints. The class we consider includes all auctions that allocate…
We consider the following communication problem: Alice and Bob each have some valuation functions $v_1(\cdot)$ and $v_2(\cdot)$ over subsets of $m$ items, and their goal is to partition the items into $S, \bar{S}$ in a way that maximizes…
We present a new type of monotone submodular functions: \emph{multi-peak submodular functions}. Roughly speaking, given a family of sets $\cF$, we construct a monotone submodular function $f$ with a high value $f(S)$ for every set $S \in…
One of the fundamental questions of Algorithmic Mechanism Design is whether there exists an inherent clash between truthfulness and computational tractability: in particular, whether polynomial-time truthful mechanisms for combinatorial…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
The existence of incentive-compatible computationally-efficient protocols for combinatorial auctions with decent approximation ratios is the paradigmatic problem in computational mechanism design. It is believed that in many cases good…