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We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
In lowest unique bid auctions, $N$ players bid for an item. The winner is whoever places the \emph{lowest} bid, provided that it is also unique. We use a grand canonical approach to derive an analytical expression for the equilibrium…
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 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…
Recommendations based on behavioral data may be faced with ambiguous statistical evidence. We consider the case of association rules, relevant e.g.~for query and product recommendations. For example: Suppose that a customer belongs to…
This paper addresses information-based sensing point selection from a set of possible sensing locations, which determines a set of measurement points maximizing the mutual information between the sensor measurements and the variables of…
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…
Designing protocols enhancing cooperation for multi-agent systems remains a grand challenge. Cheap talk, defined as costless, non-binding communication before formal action, serves as a pivotal solution. However, existing theoretical…
We study revenue maximization through sequential posted-price (SPP) mechanisms in single-dimensional settings with $n$ buyers and independent but not necessarily identical value distributions. We construct the SPP mechanisms by considering…
Social and real-world considerations such as robustness, fairness, social welfare and multi-agent tradeoffs have given rise to multi-distribution learning paradigms, such as collaborative learning, group distributionally robust…
We examine information structure design, also called "persuasion" or "signaling", in the presence of a constraint on the amount of communication. We focus on the fundamental setting of bilateral trade, which in its simplest form involves a…
We study the communication complexity of truthful combinatorial auctions, and in particular the case where valuations are either subadditive or single-minded, which we denote with $\mathsf{SubAdd}\cup\mathsf{SingleM}$. We show that for…
We study electoral campaign management scenarios in which an external party can buy votes, i.e., pay the voters to promote its preferred candidate in their preference rankings. The external party's goal is to make its preferred candidate a…
We study the incentivized information acquisition problem, where a principal hires an agent to gather information on her behalf. Such a problem is modeled as a Stackelberg game between the principal and the agent, where the principal…
There is only one technique for prior-free optimal mechanism design that generalizes beyond the structurally benevolent setting of digital goods. This technique uses random sampling to estimate the distribution of agent values and then…
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…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
We consider the provision of an abstract service to single-dimensional agents. Our model includes position auctions, single-minded combinatorial auctions, and constrained matching markets. When the agents' values are drawn from a…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item auctions, where bidders have subadditive valuations over independent items. Providing a simple mechanism that is approximately revenue-optimal in this setting is a major open problem in mechanism…
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…