Related papers: Sample Complexity of Posted Pricing for a Single I…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
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 the problems of pricing an indivisible product to consumers who are embedded in a given social network. The goal is to maximize the revenue of the seller. We assume impatient consumers who buy the product as soon as the seller…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
A sequence of recent studies show that even in the simple setting of a single seller and a single buyer with additive, independent valuations over $m$ items, the revenue-maximizing mechanism is prohibitively complex. This problem has been…
We consider a fixed-price mechanism design setting where a seller sells one item via a social network, but the seller can only directly communicate with her neighbours initially. Each other node in the network is a potential buyer with a…
We study the classic setting of envy-free pricing, in which a single seller chooses prices for its many items, with the goal of maximizing revenue once the items are allocated. Despite the large body of work addressing such settings, most…
Time or money? That is a question! In this paper, we consider this dilemma in the pricing regime, in which we try to find the optimal pricing scheme for identical items with heterogenous time-sensitive buyers. We characterize the…
We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed…
We study the revenue performance of sequential posted price mechanisms and some natural extensions, for a general setting where the valuations of the buyers are drawn from a correlated distribution. Sequential posted price mechanisms are…
We resolve the complexity of revenue-optimal deterministic auctions in the unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian setting, i.e., the optimal item pricing problem, when the buyer's values for the items are independent. We show that the problem of…
We study the problem of selling $n$ items to a single buyer with an additive valuation function. We consider the valuation of the items to be correlated, i.e., desirabilities of the buyer for the items are not drawn independently. Ideally,…
Multi-item mechanisms can be very complex offering many different bundles to the buyer that could even be randomized. Such complexity is thought to be necessary as the revenue gaps between randomized and deterministic mechanisms, or…
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…
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 consider the sample complexity of revenue maximization for multiple bidders in unrestricted multi-dimensional settings. Specifically, we study the standard model of $n$ additive bidders whose values for $m$ heterogeneous items are drawn…
This paper studies an online selection problem, where a seller seeks to sequentially sell multiple copies of an item to arriving buyers. We consider an adversarial setting, making no modeling assumptions about buyers' valuations for the…