Related papers: Rigidity in Mechanism Design and its Applications

We are interested in the problem of optimal commitments in rank-and-bid based auctions, a general class of auctions that include first price and all-pay auctions as special cases. Our main contribution is a novel approach to solve for…

In this work, we study spectrum auction problem where each request from secondary users has spatial, temporal, and spectral features. With the requests of secondary users and the reserve price of the primary user, our goal is to design…

Consider the problem of allocating goods to buyers through an auction. An auction is efficient if the resulting allocation maximizes total welfare, conditional on the information available. If buyers have private values, the…

We provide algorithms that learn simple auctions whose revenue is approximately optimal in multi-item multi-bidder settings, for a wide range of valuations including unit-demand, additive, constrained additive, XOS, and subadditive. We…

First-price auctions have largely replaced traditional bidding approaches based on Vickrey auctions in programmatic advertising. As far as learning is concerned, first-price auctions are more challenging because the optimal bidding strategy…

We consider an economic environment where a seller wants to sell an indivisible unit of good to a buyer. We show that revenue from any strategy-proof and individually rational mechanism defined on closed intervals of rich single crossing…

Sponsored search auctions are commonly modeled as an assignment of a fixed set of slots (positions) to a set of advertisers, with welfare maximization being reducible to a standard matching problem. Motivated by modern ad formats, we study…

We consider optimal mechanism design for the case with one buyer and two items. The buyer's valuations towards the two items are independent and additive. In this setting, optimal mechanism is unknown for general valuation distributions. We…

Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…

This paper studies optimal auction design when valuations depend endogenously on post-auction collaboration between the seller and the winning bidder. Both parties exert non-contractible efforts after the auction, generating a double moral…

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…

This paper studies a robust version of the classic surplus extraction problem, in which the designer knows only that the beliefs of each type belong to some set, and designs mechanisms that are suitable for all possible beliefs in that set.…

The transition to auto-bidding in online advertising has shifted the focus of auction theory from quasi-linear utility maximization to value maximization subject to financial constraints. We study mechanism design for buyers with private…

We study auction design when a seller relies on machine-learning predictions of bidders' valuations that may be unreliable. Motivated by modern ML systems that are often accurate but occasionally fail in a way that is essentially…

In this paper we formulate the fixed budget resource allocation game to understand the performance of a distributed market-based resource allocation system. Multiple users decide how to distribute their budget (bids) among multiple machines…

Many algorithms that are originally designed without explicitly considering incentive properties are later combined with simple pricing rules and used as mechanisms. The resulting mechanisms are often natural and simple to understand. But…

We study the sample complexity of learning revenue-optimal multi-item auctions. We obtain the first set of positive results that go beyond the standard but unrealistic setting of item-independence. In particular, we consider settings where…

Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…

We provide a computationally efficient black-box reduction from mechanism design to algorithm design in very general settings. Specifically, we give an approximation-preserving reduction from truthfully maximizing \emph{any} objective under…

We study the optimal behavior of a bidder in a real-time auction subject to the requirement that a specified collections of heterogeneous items be acquired within given time constraints. The problem facing this bidder is cast as a…