Related papers: On the Robustness of Mechanism Design under Total …
We consider a model of bilateral trade with private values. The value of the buyer and the cost of the seller are jointly distributed. The true joint distribution is unknown to the designer, however, the marginal distributions of the value…
We study no-money mechanisms for allocating indivisible items to strategic agents with additive preferences under a stochastic model. In this model, items' values are drawn from an underlying distribution and mechanisms are evaluated with…
This paper studies the problem of distributionally robust model predictive control (MPC) using total variation distance ambiguity sets. For a discrete-time linear system with additive disturbances, we provide a conditional value-at-risk…
Models of discrete-valued outcomes are easily misspecified if the data exhibit zero-inflation, overdispersion or contamination. Without additional knowledge about the existence and nature of this misspecification, model inference and…
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…
The aim of this paper is to address optimality of stochastic control strategies via dynamic programming subject to total variation distance ambiguity on the conditional distribution of the controlled process. We formulate the stochastic…
When selling many goods with independent valuations, we develop a distributionally robust framework, consisting of a two-player game between seller and nature. The seller has only limited knowledge about the value distribution. The seller…
Robust and distributionally robust optimization are modeling paradigms for decision-making under uncertainty where the uncertain parameters are only known to reside in an uncertainty set or are governed by any probability distribution from…
Total variation distance (TV distance) is an important measure for the difference between two distributions. Recently, there has been progress in approximating the TV distance between product distributions: a deterministic algorithm for a…
Due to the significant process variations, designers have to optimize the statistical performance distribution of nano-scale IC design in most cases. This problem has been investigated for decades under the formulation of stochastic…
Classical Bayesian mechanism design relies on the common prior assumption, but such prior is often not available in practice. We study the design of prior-independent mechanisms that relax this assumption: the seller is selling an…
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…
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…
The total variation distance is a core statistical distance between probability measures that satisfies the metric axioms, with value always falling in $[0,1]$. This distance plays a fundamental role in machine learning and signal…
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…
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…
We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $k$ heterogeneous items for sale to a single additive buyer, whose values are drawn from a known, possibly correlated prior $\mathcal{D}$. It is known that there exist priors $\mathcal{D}$ such…
We study the problem of Distributionally Robust Constrained RL (DRC-RL), where the goal is to maximize the expected reward subject to environmental distribution shifts and constraints. This setting captures situations where training and…
A fundamental assumption in classical mechanism design is that buyers are perfect optimizers. However, in practice, buyers may be limited by their computational capabilities or a lack of information, and may not be able to perfectly…
Distance covariance is a popular measure of dependence between random variables. It has some robustness properties, but not all. We prove that the influence function of the usual distance covariance is bounded, but that its breakdown value…