Related papers: Optimal Robust Mechanism in Bilateral Trading
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…
We study the bilateral trade problem where a seller owns a single indivisible item, and a potential buyer seeks to purchase it. Previous mechanisms for this problem only considered the case where the values of the buyer and the seller are…
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…
I construct a novel random double auction as a robust bilateral trading mechanism for a profit-maximizing intermediary who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. It works as follows. The intermediary publicly commits to charging a…
We efficiently solve the optimal multi-dimensional mechanism design problem for independent bidders with arbitrary demand constraints when either the number of bidders is a constant or the number of items is a constant. In the first…
Mechanism design for one-sided markets has been investigated for several decades in economics and in computer science. More recently, there has been an increased attention on mechanisms for two-sided markets, in which buyers and sellers act…
We study the problem of designing a two-sided market (double auction) to maximize the gains from trade (social welfare) under the constraints of (dominant-strategy) incentive compatibility and budget-balance. Our goal is to do so for an…
We study how to maximize the broker's (expected) profit in a two-sided market, where she buys items from a set of sellers and resells them to a set of buyers. Each seller has a single item to sell and holds a private value on her item, and…
We develop efficient algorithms to construct utility maximizing mechanisms in the presence of risk averse players (buyers and sellers) in Bayesian settings. We model risk aversion by a concave utility function, and players play…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
Bilateral trade is a fundamental economic scenario comprising a strategically acting buyer and seller, each holding valuations for the item, drawn from publicly known distributions. A mechanism is supposed to facilitate trade between these…
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…
In practice, auction data are often endogenously censored and anonymous, revealing only limited outcome statistics rather than full bid profiles. We study robust auction design when the seller observes only aggregated, anonymous order…
A seller wants to sell an item to $n$ buyers. Buyer valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution unknown to the seller; the seller only knows that the support is included in $[a, b]$. To be robust, the seller chooses a DSIC mechanism…
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…
We continue the study of the performance for fixed-price mechanisms in the bilateral trade problem, and improve approximation ratios of welfare-optimal mechanisms in several settings. Specifically, in the case where only the buyer…
This paper reexamines the classic problem of revenue maximization in single-item auctions with $n$ buyers under the lens of the robust optimization framework. The celebrated Myerson's mechanism is the format that maximizes the seller's…
We study the bilateral trade problem: one seller, one buyer and a single, indivisible item for sale. It is well known that there is no fully-efficient and incentive compatible mechanism for this problem that maintains a balanced budget. We…
We study robust mechanisms to sell a common-value good. We assume that the mechanism designer knows the prior distribution of the buyers' common value but is unsure of the buyers' information structure about the common value. We use linear…
We characterise the set of dominant strategy incentive compatible (DSIC), strongly budget balanced (SBB), and ex-post individually rational (IR) mechanisms for the multi-unit bilateral trade setting. In such a setting there is a single…