Related papers: Prophet Inequalities for Subadditive Combinatorial…
The competitive auction was first proposed by Goldberg, Hartline, and Wright. In their paper, they introduce the competitive analysis framework of online algorithm designing into the traditional revenue-maximizing auction design problem.…
We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from…
This note records a common threshold/surplus decomposition for single-threshold stopping rules in the classical prophet inequality. The same decomposition is used to certify several deterministic thresholds, including the median, half-mean,…
There are two major models of value uncertainty in the optimal stopping literature: the secretary model, which assumes no prior knowledge, and the prophet inequality model, which assumes full information about value distributions. In…
We initiate the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. Our surplus-equitable mechanism is…
We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this class,…
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…
Prophet inequalities are performance guarantees for online algorithms (a.k.a. stopping rules) solving the following "hiring problem": a decision maker sequentially inspects candidates whose values are independent random numbers and is asked…
We study the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…
We study combinatorial auctions with interdependent valuations. In such settings, each agent $i$ has a private signal $s_i$ that captures her private information, and the valuation function of every agent depends on the entire signal…
In the single stock trading prophet problem formulated by Correa et al.\ (2023), an online algorithm observes a sequence of prices of a stock. At each step, the algorithm can either buy the stock by paying the current price if it doesn't…
We show that the multiplicative weight update method provides a simple recipe for designing and analyzing optimal Bayesian Incentive Compatible (BIC) auctions, and reduces the time complexity of the problem to pseudo-polynomial in…
We consider online procurement auctions, where the agents arrive sequentially, in random order, and have private costs for their services. The buyer aims to maximize a monotone submodular value function for the subset of agents whose…
In this paper, we revisit the problem of approximating a pacing equilibrium in second-price auctions, introduced by Conitzer, Kroer, Sodomka, and Moses [Oper. Res. 2022]. We show that finding a constant-factor approximation of a pacing…
We consider Bayesian online selection problem of a matching in bipartite graphs, i.e., online weighted matching problem with edge arrivals where online algorithm knows distributions of weights, that corresponds to the intersection of two…
Hill and Kertz studied the prophet inequality on iid distributions [The Annals of Probability 1982]. They proved a theoretical bound of $1-\frac{1}{e}$ on the approximation factor of their algorithm. They conjectured that the best…
In this paper, we study sequential auctions with two budget constrained bidders and any number of identical items. All prior results on such auctions consider only two items. We construct a canonical outcome of the auction that is the only…
We construct prior-free auctions with constant-factor approximation guarantees with ordered bidders, in both unlimited and limited supply settings. We compare the expected revenue of our auctions on a bid vector to the monotone price…
This paper describes a study of agent bidding strategies, assuming combinatorial valuations for complementary and substitutable goods, in three auction environments: sequential auctions, simultaneous auctions, and the Trading Agent…
We study risk-free bidding strategies in combinatorial auctions with incomplete information. Specifically, what is the maximum profit that a complement-free (subadditive) bidder can guarantee in a multi-item combinatorial auction? Suppose…