Related papers: Simplicity in Auctions Revisited: The Primitive Co…
We consider optimal mechanism design for the case with one buyer and two items. The buyer's valuations towards the two items are independent and additive. In this setting, optimal mechanism is unknown for general valuation distributions. We…
We study the menu complexity of optimal and approximately-optimal auctions in the context of the "FedEx" problem, a so-called "one-and-a-half-dimensional" setting where a single bidder has both a value and a deadline for receiving an…
Consider a seller with m heterogeneous items for sale to a single additive buyer whose values for the items are arbitrarily correlated. It was previously shown that, in such settings, distributions exist for which the seller's optimal…
We study the multi-item mechanism design problem where a monopolist sells $n$ heterogeneous items to a single buyer. We focus on buy-many mechanisms, a natural class of mechanisms frequently used in practice. The buy-many property allows…
In this work we are concerned with the design of efficient mechanisms while eliciting limited information from the agents. First, we study the performance of sampling approximations in facility location games. Our key result is to show that…
Since economic mechanisms are often applied to very different instances of the same problem, it is desirable to identify mechanisms that work well in a wide range of circumstances. We pursue this goal for a position auction setting and…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
A sequence of recent studies show that even in the simple setting of a single seller and a single buyer with additive, independent valuations over $m$ items, the revenue-maximizing mechanism is prohibitively complex. This problem has been…
In the multi-unit pricing problem, multiple units of a single item are for sale. A buyer's valuation for $n$ units of the item is $v \min \{ n, d\} $, where the per unit valuation $v$ and the capacity $d$ are private information of the…
Generating good revenue is one of the most important problems in Bayesian auction design, and many (approximately) optimal dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) Bayesian mechanisms have been constructed for various auction settings.…
We show that the Revenue-Optimal Deterministic Mechanism Design problem for a single additive buyer is #P-hard, even when the distributions have support size 2 for each item and, more importantly, even when the optimal solution is…
Finding the optimal (revenue-maximizing) mechanism to sell multiple items has been a prominent and notoriously difficult open problem. Existing work has mainly focused on deriving analytical results tailored to a particular class of…
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…
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…
We introduce the notion of rigidity in auction design and use it to analyze some fundamental aspects of mechanism design. We focus on single-item auctions where the values of the bidders are drawn from some (possibly correlated)…
We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…
In a single-parameter mechanism design problem, a provider is looking to sell a service to a group of potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ has a private value $v_i$ for receiving the service and a feasibility constraint restricts which sets of…
Prior work of Hartmanis and Simon (Hartmanis and Simon, 1974) and Floyd and Knuth (Floyd and Knuth, 1990) investigated what happens if a device uses primitive steps more natural than single updates of a Turing tape. One finding was that in…
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…