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A speculative agent with Prospect Theory preference chooses the optimal time to purchase and then to sell an indivisible risky asset to maximize the expected utility of the round-trip profit net of transaction costs. The optimization…
Users can now give back energies to the grid using distributed resources. Proper incentive mechanisms are required for such users, also known as prosumers, in order to maximize the sell-back amount while maintaining the retailer's profit.…
Lotteries are a prevalent form of gambling between a seller and buyers. Designing a lottery requires a model of how buyers make decisions when confronted with uncertain outcomes. Cumulative prospect theory (CPT) is a descriptive model that…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
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.…
Bidding in simultaneous auctions is challenging because an agent's value for a good in one auction may depend on the uncertain outcome of other auctions: the so-called exposure problem. Given the gap in understanding of general simultaneous…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
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…
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…
We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
Two sellers compete to sell identical products to a single buyer. Each seller chooses an arbitrary mechanism, possibly involving lotteries, to sell their product. The utility-maximizing buyer can choose to participate in one or both…
A buyer wishes to purchase a durable good from a seller who in each period chooses a mechanism under limited commitment. The buyer's valuation is binary and fully persistent. We show that posted prices implement all equilibrium outcomes of…
A patient seller aims to sell a good to an impatient buyer (i.e., one who discounts utility over time). The buyer will remain in the market for a period of time $T$, and her private value is drawn from a publicly known distribution. What is…
We consider one buyer and one seller. For a bundle $(t,q)\in [0,\infty[\times [0,1]=\mathbb{Z}$, $q$ either refers to the wining probability of an object or a share of a good, and $t$ denotes the payment that the buyer makes. We define…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…
We consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not only to the…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
We consider an economic environment with one buyer and one seller. For a bundle $(t,q)\in [0,\infty[\times [0,1]=\mathbb{Z}$, $q$ refers to the winning probability of an object, and $t$ denotes the payment that the buyer makes. We consider…