Related papers: Simultaneous Auctions are Approximately Revenue-Op…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
Aiming to overcome some of the limitations of worst-case analysis, the recently proposed framework of "algorithms with predictions" allows algorithms to be augmented with a (possibly erroneous) machine-learned prediction that they can use…
We derive optimal strategies for a bidding agent that participates in multiple, simultaneous second-price auctions with perfect substitutes. We prove that, if everyone else bids locally in a single auction, the global bidder should always…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
In digital goods auctions, there is an auctioneer who sells an item with unlimited supply to a set of potential buyers, and the objective is to design truthful auction to maximize the total profit of the auctioneer. Motivated from an…
Maximizing the revenue from selling two or more goods has been shown to require the use of $nonmonotonic$ mechanisms, where a higher-valuation buyer may pay less than a lower-valuation one. Here we show that the restriction to $monotonic$…
We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to…
Motivated by practical concerns in the online advertising industry, we study a bidder subset selection problem in single-item auctions. In this problem, a large pool of candidate bidders have independent values sampled from known prior…
A central problem in Microeconomics is to design auctions with good revenue properties. In this setting, the bidders' valuations for the items are private knowledge, but they are drawn from publicly known prior distributions. The goal is to…
We consider a revenue-maximizing single seller with $m$ items for sale to a single buyer whose value $v(\cdot)$ for the items is drawn from a known distribution $D$ of support $k$. A series of works by Cai et al. establishes that when each…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…
We study multi-buyer multi-item sequential item pricing mechanisms for revenue maximization with the goal of approximating a natural fractional relaxation -- the ex ante optimal revenue. We assume that buyers' values are subadditive but…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
We provide a near-optimal, computationally efficient algorithm for the unit-demand pricing problem, where a seller wants to price n items to optimize revenue against a unit-demand buyer whose values for the items are independently drawn…
The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…
The first-price auction is popular in practice for its simplicity and transparency. Moreover, its potential virtues grow in complex settings where incentive compatible auctions may generate little or no revenue. Unfortunately, the…
We show that the Revenue-Optimal Deterministic Mechanism Design problem for a single additive buyer is #P-hard, even when the distributions have support size 2 for each item and, more importantly, even when the optimal solution is…
We propose a combinatorial ascending auction that is "approximately" optimal, requiring minimal rationality to achieve this level of optimality, and is robust to strategic and distributional uncertainties. Specifically, the auction is…
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…