Related papers: Revenue Variance Minimization: Beyond First Price …
We provide a characterization of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanisms in settings where a monopolist sells k items over k periods to a buyer who realizes his value for item i in the beginning of period i. We require that the mechanism…
Designing revenue optimal auctions for selling an item to $n$ symmetric bidders is a fundamental problem in mechanism design. Myerson (1981) shows that the second price auction with an appropriate reserve price is optimal when bidders'…
We consider the problem of the optimization of bidding strategies in prior-dependent revenue-maximizing auctions, when the seller fixes the reserve prices based on the bid distributions. Our study is done in the setting where one bidder is…
We study how a budget-constrained bidder should learn to adaptively bid in repeated first-price auctions to maximize her cumulative payoff. This problem arose due to an industry-wide shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions…
We present a general framework for designing approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms for multi-item additive auctions, which applies to both truthful and non-truthful auctions. Given a (not necessarily truthful) single-item auction format…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
In many settings agents participate in multiple different auctions that are not necessarily implemented simultaneously. Future opportunities affect strategic considerations of the players in each auction, introducing externalities.…
We investigate the extent to which price updates can increase the revenue of a seller with little prior information on demand. We study prior-free revenue maximization for a seller with unlimited supply of n item types facing m myopic…
A canonical setting for non-monetary online resource allocation is one where agents compete over multiple rounds for a single item per round, with i.i.d. valuations and additive utilities across rounds. With $n$ symmetric agents, a natural…
We initiate the study of how auction design affects the division of surplus among buyers. We propose a parsimonious measure for equity and apply it to the family of standard auctions for homogeneous goods. Our surplus-equitable mechanism is…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
In the context of advertising auctions, finding good reserve prices is a notoriously challenging learning problem. This is due to the heterogeneity of ad opportunity types and the non-convexity of the objective function. In this work, we…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
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 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…
Motivated by practical constraints in online advertising, we investigate single-parameter auction design for bidders with constraints on their Return On Investment (ROI) -- a targeted minimum ratio between the obtained value and the…
We study multi-unit auctions in which bidders have limited knowledge of opponent strategies and values. We characterize optimal prior-free bids; these bids minimize the maximal loss in expected utility resulting from uncertainty surrounding…
A recent line of research has established a novel desideratum for designing approximately-revenue-optimal multi-item mechanisms, namely the buy-many constraint. Under this constraint, prices for different allocations made by the mechanism…
We consider repeated multi-unit auctions with uniform pricing, which are widely used in practice for allocating goods such as carbon licenses. In each round, $K$ identical units of a good are sold to a group of buyers that have valuations…
This paper considers Bayesian revenue maximization in the $k$-unit setting, where a monopolist seller has $k$ copies of an indivisible item and faces $n$ unit-demand buyers (whose value distributions can be non-identical). Four basic…