Related papers: Rigidity in Mechanism Design and its Applications
In this paper we revisit the notion of simplicity in mechanisms. We consider a seller of $m$ items, facing a single buyer with valuation $v$. We observe that previous attempts to define complexity measures often fail to classify mechanisms…
I study the design of auctions in which the auctioneer is assumed to have information only about the marginal distribution of a generic bidder's valuation, but does not know the correlation structure of the joint distribution of bidders'…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
The design of optimal auctions is a problem of interest in economics, game theory and computer science. Despite decades of effort, strategyproof, revenue-maximizing auction designs are still not known outside of restricted settings.…
Embedding advertisements into large language model (LLM) outputs introduces a fundamental tension: revenue optimization can distort content and degrade user experience. Existing approaches largely ignore this trade-off, often forcing…
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…
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…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
In the standard single-dimensional model of position auctions, bidders agree on the relative values of the positions and each of them submits a single bid that is interpreted in terms of these values. Motivated by current practice in…
We study the efficiency guarantees in the simple auction environment where the auctioneer has one unit of divisible good to be distributed among a number of budget constrained agents. With budget constraints, the social welfare cannot be…
A canonical setting for non-monetary online resource allocation is one where agents compete over multiple rounds for a single item per round, with i.i.d. valuations and additive utilities across rounds. With $n$ symmetric agents, a natural…
We study the efficiency of simple combinatorial auctions for the allocation of a set of items to a set of agents, with private subadditive valuation functions and budget constraints. The class we consider includes all auctions that allocate…
We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…
Designing revenue optimal auctions for selling an item to $n$ symmetric bidders is a fundamental problem in mechanism design. Myerson (1981) shows that the second price auction with an appropriate reserve price is optimal when bidders'…
We improve the best known competitive ratio (from 1/4 to 1/2), for the online multi-unit allocation problem, where the objective is to maximize the single-price revenue. Moreover, the competitive ratio of our algorithm tends to 1, as the…
We introduce locality: a new property of multi-bidder auctions that formally separates the simplicity of optimal single-dimensional multi-bidder auctions from the complexity of optimal multi-dimensional multi-bidder auctions. Specifically,…
We study multidimensional mechanism design in a common scenario where players have private information about their willingness to pay and their ability to pay. We provide a complete characterization of dominant-strategy incentive-compatible…
This study explores the monotonicity of adaptive clinching auctions -- a key mechanism in budget-constrained auctions -- with respect to fluctuations in the number of bidders. Specifically, we investigate how the addition of new bidders…
We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a…
The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…