Related papers: Simplicity in Auctions Revisited: The Primitive Co…
Consider a seller that intends to auction some item. The seller can invest money and effort in advertising in different market segments in order to recruit $n$ bidders to the auction. Alternatively, the seller can have a much cheaper and…
We consider mechanisms that provide traders the opportunity to exchange commodity $i$ for commodity $j$, for certain ordered pairs $ij$. Given any connected graph $G$ of opportunities, we show that there is a unique mechanism $M_{G}$ that…
The competition complexity of an auction setting is the number of additional bidders needed such that the simple mechanism of selling items separately (with additional bidders) achieves greater revenue than the optimal but complex…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
Competition complexity formalizes a compelling intuition: rather than refining the mechanism, how much additional competition is sufficient for a simple mechanism to compete with an optimal one? We begin the study of this question in…
We study a classic Bayesian mechanism design setting of monopoly problem for an additive buyer in the presence of budgets. In this setting a monopolist seller with $m$ heterogeneous items faces a single buyer and seeks to maximize her…
\emph{Reductions} combine collections of input values with an associative (and usually also commutative) operator to produce either a single, or a collection of outputs. They are ubiquitous in computing, especially with big data and deep…
Single-shot auctions are commonly used as a means to sell goods, for example when selling ad space or allocating radio frequencies, however devising mechanisms for auctions with multiple bidders and multiple items can be complicated. It has…
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 study the problem of characterizing revenue optimal auctions for single-minded buyers. Each buyer is interested only in a specific bundle of items and has a value for the same. Both his bundle and its value are his private information.…
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 study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…
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…
While auction theory views bids and valuations as continuous variables, real-world auctions are necessarily discrete. In this paper, we use a combination of analytical and computational methods to investigate whether incorporating…
We study the classic setting of envy-free pricing, in which a single seller chooses prices for its many items, with the goal of maximizing revenue once the items are allocated. Despite the large body of work addressing such settings, most…
We perform a simulation-based analysis of keyword auctions modeled as one-shot games of incomplete information to study a series of mechanism design questions. Our first question addresses the degree to which incentive compatibility fails…
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…
Decision trees are popular classification models, providing high accuracy and intuitive explanations. However, as the tree size grows the model interpretability deteriorates. Traditional tree-induction algorithms, such as C4.5 and CART,…
This paper develops a general approach, rooted in statistical learning theory, to learning an approximately revenue-maximizing auction from data. We introduce $t$-level auctions to interpolate between simple auctions, such as welfare…