Related papers: Multidimensional Bayesian Utility Maximization: Ti…
We propose a new model for aggregating preferences over a set of indivisible items based on a quantile value. In this model, each agent is endowed with a specific quantile, and the value of a given bundle is defined by the corresponding…
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…
What fraction of the potential social surplus in an environment can be extracted by a revenue-maximizing monopolist? We investigate this problem in Bayesian single-parameter environments with independent private values. The precise answer…
We study the problem of maximizing Nash social welfare, which is the geometric mean of agents' utilities, in two well-known models. The first model involves one-sided preferences, where a set of indivisible items is allocated among a group…
In the Bayesian approach to sequential decision making, exact calculation of the (subjective) utility is intractable. This extends to most special cases of interest, such as reinforcement learning problems. While utility bounds are known to…
We characterize Pareto optimality via "near" weighted utilitarian welfare maximization. One characterization sequentially maximizes utilitarian welfare functions using a finite sequence of nonnegative and eventually positive welfare…
Motivated by applications such as viral marketing, the problem of influence maximization (IM) has been extensively studied in the literature. The goal is to select a small number of users to adopt an item such that it results in a large…
We study the problem of selection in the context of Bayesian persuasion. We are given multiple agents with hidden values (or quality scores), to whom resources must be allocated by a welfare-maximizing decision-maker. An intermediary with…
We study the fair allocation of indivisible items to $n$ agents to maximize the utilitarian social welfare, where the fairness criterion is envy-free up to one item and there are only two different utility functions shared by the agents. We…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
Given a set of $m$ agents and a set of $n$ items, where agent $A$ has utility $u_{A,i}$ for item $i$, our goal is to allocate items to agents to maximize fairness. Specifically, the utility of an agent is the sum of its utilities for items…
It was recently shown in [http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.5518] that revenue optimization can be computationally efficiently reduced to welfare optimization in all multi-dimensional Bayesian auction problems with arbitrary (possibly…
We consider the problem of allocating multiple indivisible items to a set of networked agents to maximize the social welfare subject to network externalities. Here, the social welfare is given by the sum of agents' utilities and…
We study one-sided matching problems where $n$ agents have preferences over $m$ objects and each of them need to be assigned to at most one object. Most work on such problems assume that the agents only have ordinal preferences and usually…
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
In this work, we propose an axiomatic approach for measuring the performance/welfare of a system consisting of concurrent agents in a resource-driven system. Our approach provides a unifying view on popular system optimality principles,…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
We present a recommender system based on the Random Utility Model. Online shoppers are modeled as rational decision makers with limited information, and the recommendation task is formulated as the problem of optimally enriching the…
We study Bayesian mechanism design problems in settings where agents have budgets. Specifically, an agent's utility for an outcome is given by his value for the outcome minus any payment he makes to the mechanism, as long as the payment is…
Fair allocation of indivisible goods studies allocating $m$ goods among $n$ agents in a fair manner. While fairness is a fundamental requirement in many real-world applications, it often conflicts with (economic) efficiency. This raises a…