Related papers: Discrete Single-Parameter Optimal Auction Design
We study a classic Bayesian mechanism design setting of monopoly problem for an additive buyer in the presence of budgets. In this setting a monopolist seller with $m$ heterogeneous items faces a single buyer and seeks to maximize her…
With the increasing use of auctions in online advertising, there has been a large effort to study seller revenue maximization, following Myerson's seminal work, both theoretically and practically. We take the point of view of the buyer in…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
Traditional combinatorial spectrum auctions mainly rely on fixed bidding and matching processes, which limit participants' ability to adapt their strategies and often result in suboptimal social welfare in dynamic spectrum sharing…
We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing auctions for allocating multiple goods to flexible consumers. In our model, each consumer is interested in a subset of goods known as its flexibility set and wants to consume one good…
In digital goods auctions, there is an auctioneer who sells an item with unlimited supply to a set of potential buyers, and the objective is to design truthful auction to maximize the total profit of the auctioneer. Motivated from an…
We study the problem of designing a two-sided market (double auction) to maximize the gains from trade (social welfare) under the constraints of (dominant-strategy) incentive compatibility and budget-balance. Our goal is to do so for an…
A central issue in applying auction theory in practice is the problem of dealing with budget-constrained agents. A desirable goal in practice is to design incentive compatible, individually rational, and Pareto optimal auctions while…
Diffusion auction design for combinatorial settings is a long-standing challenge. One difficulty is that we cannot directly extend the solutions for simpler settings to combinatorial settings (like extending the Vickrey auction to VCG in…
Sponsored search auctions are commonly modeled as an assignment of a fixed set of slots (positions) to a set of advertisers, with welfare maximization being reducible to a standard matching problem. Motivated by modern ad formats, we study…
We consider a revenue-maximizing single seller with $m$ items for sale to a single buyer whose value $v(\cdot)$ for the items is drawn from a known distribution $D$ of support $k$. A series of works by Cai et al. establishes that when each…
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…
We consider a multi-dimensional screening problem of selling a product with multiple quality levels and design virtual value functions to derive conditions that imply optimality of only selling highest quality. A challenge of designing…
We study large markets with a single seller which can produce many types of goods, and many multi-minded buyers. The seller chooses posted prices for its many items, and the buyers purchase bundles to maximize their utility. For this…
Budget-feasible procurement has been a major paradigm in mechanism design since its introduction by Singer (2010). An auctioneer (buyer) with a strict budget constraint is interested in buying goods or services from a group of strategic…
In this paper, we propose a novel sealed-bid auction framework to address the problem of dynamic spectrum allocation in cognitive radio (CR) networks. We design an optimal auction mechanism that maximizes the moderator's expected utility,…
Constraints on agent's ability to pay play a major role in auction design for any setting where the magnitude of financial transactions is sufficiently large. Those constraints have been traditionally modeled in mechanism design as…
We study single-good auctions in a setting where each player knows his own valuation only within a constant multiplicative factor \delta{} in (0,1), and the mechanism designer knows \delta. The classical notions of implementation in…
Computational and economic results suggest that social welfare maximization and combinatorial auction design are much easier when bidders' valuations satisfy the "gross substitutes" condition. The goal of this paper is to evaluate…
This paper develops a general approach, rooted in statistical learning theory, to learning an approximately revenue-maximizing auction from data. We introduce $t$-level auctions to interpolate between simple auctions, such as welfare…