Related papers: Rigidity in Mechanism Design and its Applications
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…
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 a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing auctions for allocating multiple goods to flexible consumers. In our model, each consumer is interested in a subset of goods known as its flexibility set and wants to consume one good…
We study auction design in the celebrated interdependence model introduced by Milgrom and Weber [1982], where a mechanism designer allocates a good, maximizing the value of the agent who receives it, while inducing truthfulness using…
This paper studies mechanism design for auctions with externalities on budgets, a novel setting where the budgets that bidders commit are adjusted due to the externality of the competitors' allocation outcomes-a departure from traditional…
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…
A fundamental assumption in classical mechanism design is that buyers are perfect optimizers. However, in practice, buyers may be limited by their computational capabilities or a lack of information, and may not be able to perfectly…
Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic…
A seminal result of Bulow and Klemperer [1989] demonstrates the power of competition for extracting revenue: when selling a single item to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn i.i.d. from a regular distribution, the simple welfare-maximizing…
The Competition Complexity of an auction measures how much competition is needed for the revenue of a simple auction to surpass the optimal revenue. A classic result from auction theory by Bulow and Klemperer [9], states that the…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
We consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…
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…
We consider revenue-optimal mechanism design in the interdimensional setting, where one dimension is the 'value' of the buyer, and one is a 'type' that captures some auxiliary information. One setting is the FedEx Problem, for which FGKK…
The existing literature on optimal auctions focuses on optimizing the expected revenue of the seller, and is appropriate for risk-neutral sellers. In this paper, we identify good mechanisms for risk-averse sellers. As is standard in the…
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 design a fixed-price auction mechanism for a seller to sell multiple items in a tree-structured market. The buyers have independently drawn valuation from a uniform distribution, and the seller would like to incentivize buyers to invite…
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…