Related papers: No Ascending Auction can find Equilibrium for SubM…
We consider the sample complexity of revenue maximization for multiple bidders in unrestricted multi-dimensional settings. Specifically, we study the standard model of $n$ additive bidders whose values for $m$ heterogeneous items are drawn…
Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bids reach the seller directly. We study how this picture changes when a revenue-maximizing intermediary controls access to the seller's auction. Motivated by blockchain auctions, online…
We discuss bundle auctions within the framework of an integer allocation problem. We show that for multi-unit auctions, of which bundle auctions are a special case, market equilibrium and constrained market equilibrium are equivalent…
We consider auction environments in which at the time of the auction bidders observe signals about their ex-post value. We introduce a model of novice bidders who do not know know the joint distribution of signals and instead build a…
We experimentally evaluate the comparative performance of the winner-bid, average-bid, and loser-bid auctions for the dissolution of a partnership. The analysis of these auctions based on the empirical equilibrium refinement of Velez and…
We initiate the study of the social welfare loss caused by corrupt auctioneers, both in single-item and multi-unit auctions. In our model, the auctioneer may collude with the winning bidders by letting them lower their bids in exchange for…
In this note we study the greedy algorithm for combinatorial auctions with submodular bidders. It is well known that this algorithm provides an approximation ratio of $2$ for every order of the items. We show that if the valuations are…
We study a novel class of mechanism design problems in which the outcomes are constrained by the payments. This basic class of mechanism design problems captures many common economic situations, and yet it has not been studied, to our…
We consider the classical linear assignment problem, and we introduce new auction algorithms for its optimal and suboptimal solution. The algorithms are founded on duality theory, and are related to ideas of competitive bidding by persons…
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…
The existing literature on optimal auctions focuses on optimizing the expected revenue of the seller, and is appropriate for risk-neutral sellers. In this paper, we identify good mechanisms for risk-averse sellers. As is standard in the…
We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with {\em bivalued submodular valuations} -- each good provides a marginal gain of either $a$ or $b$ ($a < b$) and goods have decreasing marginal gains. This…
We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods (positively valued items) and chores (negatively valued items) among agents with decreasing marginal utilities over items. Our focus is on instances where all the agents have…
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…
Consider Myerson's optimal auction with respect to an inaccurate prior, e.g., estimated from data, which is an underestimation of the true value distribution. Can the auctioneer expect getting at least the optimal revenue w.r.t. the…
The Competition Complexity of an auction measures how much competition is needed for the revenue of a simple auction to surpass the optimal revenue. A classic result from auction theory by Bulow and Klemperer [9], states that the…
The Competition Complexity of an auction setting refers to the number of additional bidders necessary in order for the (deterministic, prior-independent, dominant strategy truthful) Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism to achieve greater revenue…
The Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism is infamously revenue non-monotone in combinatorial auctions. I.e., when a buyer increases their value for a bundle of items, the total auction revenue may decrease. Combinatorial auctions exhibit…
We consider a multi-dimensional screening problem of selling a product with multiple quality levels and design virtual value functions to derive conditions that imply optimality of only selling highest quality. A challenge of designing…
We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $m$ heterogeneous items and a single buyer whose valuation $v$ for the items may exhibit both substitutes (i.e., for some $S, T$, $v(S \cup T) < v(S) + v(T)$) and complements (i.e., for some $S,…