Related papers: Shill-Proof Auctions
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…
We study the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…
We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…
We exhibit incentive compatible multi-unit auctions that are not affine maximizers (i.e., are not of the VCG family) and yet approximate the social welfare to within a factor of $1+\epsilon$. For the case of two-item two-bidder auctions we…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
We study the revenue comparison problem of auctions when the seller has a maxmin expected utility preference. The seller holds a set of priors around some reference belief, interpreted as an approximating model of the true probability law…
We study a single-buyer pricing problem with unreliable side information, motivated by the increasing use of AI-assisted decision-making and LLM-based predictions. The seller observes a private sample that may be either accurate (coinciding…
The all-pay auction, a classic competitive model, is widely applied in scenarios such as political elections, sports competitions, and research and development, where all participants pay their bids regardless of winning or losing. However,…
In research and policy-making guidelines, the single-bidder rate is a commonly used proxy of corruption in public procurement used but ipso facto this is not evidence of a corrupt auction, but an uncompetitive auction. And while an…
A double auction game with an infinite number of buyers and sellers is introduced. All sellers posses one unit of a good, all buyers desire to buy one unit. Each seller and each buyer has a private valuation of the good. The distribution of…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
Motivated by applications such as stock exchanges and spectrum auctions, there is a growing interest in mechanisms for arranging trade in two-sided markets. Existing mechanisms are either not truthful, or do not guarantee an…
In the last three decades, we have seen a significant increase in trading goods and services through online auctions. However, this business created an attractive environment for malicious moneymakers who can commit different types of fraud…
Contemporary real-world online ad auctions differ from canonical models [Edelman et al., 2007; Varian, 2009] in at least four ways: (1) values and click-through rates can depend upon users' search queries, but advertisers can only partially…
We study the optimal auction design problem when bidders' preferences follow the maxmin expected utility model. We suppose that each bidder's set of priors consists of beliefs close to the seller's belief, where "closeness" is defined by a…
Second-price auctions with deposits are frequently used in blockchain environments. An auction takes place on-chain: bidders deposit an amount that fully covers their bid (but possibly exceeds it) in a smart contract. The deposit is used as…
We introduce a new numerical framework to learn optimal bidding strategies in repeated auctions when the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. Crucially, we do not assume that the bidders know what optimization mechanism is used…
While auction theory views bids and valuations as continuous variables, real-world auctions are necessarily discrete. In this paper, we use a combination of analytical and computational methods to investigate whether incorporating…
This letter considers the design of an auction mechanism to sell the object of a seller when the buyers quantize their private value estimates regarding the object prior to communicating them to the seller. The designed auction mechanism…