Related papers: Prior-Independent Auctions for Heterogeneous Bidde…

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…

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…

Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…

A central problem in Microeconomics is to design auctions with good revenue properties. In this setting, the bidders' valuations for the items are private knowledge, but they are drawn from publicly known prior distributions. The goal is to…

First-price auctions are one of the most popular mechanisms for selling goods and services, with applications ranging from display advertising to timber sales. Unlike their close cousin, the second-price auction, first-price auctions do not…

Inspired by Internet ad auction applications, we study the problem of allocating a single item via an auction when bidders place very different values on the item. We formulate this as the problem of prior-free auction and focus on…

We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…

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…

This paper considers prior-independent mechanism design, namely identifying a single mechanism that has near optimal performance on every prior distribution. We show that mechanisms with truthtelling equilibria, a.k.a., revelation…

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…

We consider a dynamic mechanism design problem where an auctioneer sells an indivisible good to groups of buyers in every round, for a total of $T$ rounds. The auctioneer aims to maximize their discounted overall revenue while adhering to a…

We study the optimal auction design problem when bidders' preferences follow the maxmin expected utility model. We suppose that each bidder's set of priors consists of beliefs close to the seller's belief, where "closeness" is defined by a…

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…

In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…

When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…

We study independent private values auction environments in which the auctioneer's revenue depends nonlinearly on bidders' interim winning probabilities. Our framework accommodates heterogeneity among bidders and places no ad hoc…

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…

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 the revenue comparison problem of auctions when the seller has a maxmin expected utility preference. The seller holds a set of priors around some reference belief, interpreted as an approximating model of the true probability law…

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…