Related papers: Procurement in welfare programs: Evidence and impl…

This paper proposes a framewrok for analyzing how the welfare effects of policy interventions are distributed across individuals when those effects are unobserved. Rather than focusing solely on average outcomes, the approach uses readily…

We consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not only to the…

We study the design of loss functions for click-through rates (CTR) to optimize (social) welfare in advertising auctions. Existing works either only focus on CTR predictions without consideration of business objectives (e.g., welfare) in…

A single advertisement often benefits many parties, for example, an ad for a Samsung laptop benefits Microsoft. We study this phenomenon in search advertising auctions and show that standard solutions, including the status quo ignorance of…

We consider the problem of a designer who wants to allocate resources to representatives, that then distribute the resources they receive among the individuals they represent. Motivated by the way Feeding America, one of the largest U.S.…

Procuring agricultural inputs (agri-inputs for short) such as seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides, at desired quality levels and at affordable cost, forms a critical component of agricultural input operations. This is a particularly…

This paper studies multi-unit auctions powered by intermediaries, where each intermediary owns a private set of unit-demand buyers and all intermediaries are networked with each other. Our goal is to incentivize the intermediaries to…

We consider the problem of devising incentive strategies for viral marketing of a product. In particular, we assume that the seller can influence penetration of the product by offering two incentive programs: a) direct incentives to…

We study the problem of auction design for advertising platforms that face strategic advertisers who are bidding across platforms. Each advertiser's goal is to maximize their total value or conversions while satisfying some constraint(s)…

Walrasian prices, if they exist, have the property that one can assign every buyer some bundle in her demand set, such that the resulting assignment will maximize social welfare. Unfortunately, this assumes carefully breaking ties amongst…

Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…

In this research, we study the problem that a collector acquires items from the owner based on the item qualities the owner declares and an independent appraiser's assessments. The owner is interested in maximizing the probability that the…

A common objective in mechanism design is to choose the outcome (for example, allocation of resources) that maximizes the sum of the agents' valuations, without introducing incentives for agents to misreport their preferences. The class of…

Contemporary real-world online ad auctions differ from canonical models [Edelman et al., 2007; Varian, 2009] in at least four ways: (1) values and click-through rates can depend upon users' search queries, but advertisers can only partially…

Walrasian equilibrium prices can be said to coordinate markets: They support a welfare optimal allocation in which each buyer is buying bundle of goods that is individually most preferred. However, this clean story has two caveats. First,…

Combinatorial auctions (CA) are a well-studied area in algorithmic mechanism design. However, contrary to the standard model, empirical studies suggest that a bidder's valuation often does not depend solely on the goods assigned to him. For…

Diffusion auction is an emerging business model where a seller aims to incentivise buyers in a social network to diffuse the auction information thereby attracting potential buyers. We focus on designing mechanisms for multi-unit diffusion…

The internet advertising market is a multi-billion dollar industry, in which advertisers buy thousands of ad placements every day by repeatedly participating in auctions. An important and ubiquitous feature of these auctions is the presence…

Motivated by the problem of market power in electricity markets, we introduced in previous works a mechanism for simplified markets of two agents with linear cost. In standard procurement auctions, the market power resulting from the…

We study markets where firms compete for consumer attention by subsidizing costly product inspection. These subsidies do not change product quality, but they alter the order in which consumers search by lowering inspection costs. We…