Related papers: Revenue Variance Minimization: Beyond First Price …
A large fraction of online advertisement is sold via repeated second price auctions. In these auctions, the reserve price is the main tool for the auctioneer to boost revenues. In this work, we investigate the following question: Can…
We provide a new, much simplified and straightforward proof to a result of Pavlov [2011] regarding the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling two goods with uniformly i.i.d. valuations over intervals $[c,c+1]$, to an additive buyer. This…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
Posted price mechanisms (PPM) constitute one of the predominant practices to price goods in online marketplaces and their revenue guarantees have been a central object of study in the last decade. We consider a basic setting where the…
We consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…
We study revenue maximization when a seller offers $k$ identical units to ex ante heterogeneous, unit-demand buyers. While anonymous pricing can be $\Theta(\log k)$ worse than optimal in general multi-unit environments, we show that this…
Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…
Advertisers increasingly use automated bidding to optimize their ad campaigns on online advertising platforms. Autobidding optimizes an advertiser's objective subject to various constraints, e.g. average ROI and budget constraints. In this…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…
We consider the problem of maximizing revenue when selling k items to a single buyer with known valuation distributions. We show that for a single, additive buyer whose valuations for for the items are distributed according to i.i.d.…
This paper studies mechanism design for revenue maximization in a distribution-reporting setting, where the auctioneer does not know the buyers' true value distributions. Instead, each buyer reports and commits to a bid distribution in the…
A prevalent assumption in auction theory is that the auctioneer has full control over the market and that the allocation she dictates is final. In practice, however, agents might be able to resell acquired items in an aftermarket. A…
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…
We compare the expected efficiency of revenue maximizing (or {\em optimal}) mechanisms with that of efficiency maximizing ones. We show that the efficiency of the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling a single item with k + log_{e/(e-1)}…
Simultaneous item auctions are simple procedures for allocating items to bidders with potentially complex preferences over different item sets. In a simultaneous auction, every bidder submits bids on all items simultaneously. The allocation…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
This note pursues two primary objectives. First, we analyze the outcomes of an all-pay auction within a store where buyers with and without financial constraints arrive at varying rates, and where buyer types are private information.…
Many online companies sell advertisement space in second-price auctions with reserve. In this paper, we develop a probabilistic method to learn a profitable strategy to set the reserve price. We use historical auction data with features to…
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 the question of setting and testing reserve prices in single item auctions when the bidders are not identical. At a high level, there are two generalizations of the standard second price auction: in the lazy version we first…