Related papers: Non-Excludable Bilateral Trade Between Groups
We study bilateral trade with a broker, where a buyer and seller interact exclusively through the broker. The broker strategically maximizes her payoff through arbitrage by trading with the buyer and seller at different prices. We study…
The celebrated Myerson--Satterthwaite theorem shows that in bilateral trade, no mechanism can be simultaneously fully efficient, Bayesian incentive compatible (BIC), and budget balanced (BB). This naturally raises the question of how…
Bilateral trade models the problem of intermediating between two rational agents -- a seller and a buyer -- both characterized by a private valuation for an item they want to trade. We study the online learning version of the problem, in…
We investigate activities that have different periods of duration. We define the profit intensity as a measure of this economic category. The profit intensity in a repeated trading has a unique property of attaining its maximum at a fixed…
Barter exchange studies the setting where each agent owns a good, and they can exchange with each other if that gives them more preferred goods. This exchange will give better outcomes if there are more participants. The challenge here is…
A celebrated impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) shows that any truthful mechanism for two-sided markets that maximizes social welfare must run a deficit, resulting in a necessity to relax welfare efficiency and the use…
The notion that economies should normally be in equilibrium is by now well-established; equally well-established is that economies are almost never precisely in equilibrium. Using a very general formulation, we show that under dynamics that…
We introduce and analyze a variation of the Bertrand game in which the revenue is shared between two players. This game models situations in which one economic agent can provide goods/services to consumers either directly or through an…
We study balanced exchange problems in which agents with responsive preferences are endowed with multiple indivisible objects and can trade without transfers (e.g. shift exchange, time-banking). Eliciting full preferences over bundles is…
Loyal buyer-seller relationships can arise by design, e.g. when a seller tailors a product to a specific market niche to accomplish the best possible returns, and buyers respond to the dedicated efforts the seller makes to meet their needs.…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
Bilateral bargaining under incomplete information provides a controlled testbed for evaluating large language model (LLM) agent capabilities. Bilateral trade demands individual rationality, strategic surplus maximization, and cooperation to…
We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…
A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…
The Walras approach to equilibrium focuses on the existence of market prices at which the total demands for goods are matched by the total supplies. Trading activities that might identify such prices by bringing agents together as potential…
We consider a market where a seller sells multiple units of a commodity in a social network. Each node/buyer in the social network can only directly communicate with her neighbours, i.e. the seller can only sell the commodity to her…
We consider trading indivisible and easily transferable \emph{durable goods}, which are goods that an agent can receive, use, and trade again for a different good. This is often the case with books that can be read and later exchanged for…
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…
A recent line of work in mechanism design has focused on guaranteeing incentive compatibility for agents without contingent reasoning skills: obviously strategyproof mechanisms guarantee that it is "obvious" for these imperfectly rational…
Consider a barter exchange problem over a finite set of agents, where each agent owns an item and is also associated with a (privately known) wish list of items belonging to the other agents. An outcome of the problem is a (re)allocation of…