Related papers: Strategy-proof Selling: a Geometric Approach
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…
We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…
Strategy-proof mechanisms are widely used in market design. In an abstract allocation framework where outside options are available to agents, we obtain two results for strategy-proof mechanisms. They provide a unified foundation for…
We explore the approximation power of deterministic obviously strategy-proof mechanisms in auctions, where the objective is welfare maximization. A trivial ascending auction on the grand bundle guarantees an approximation of $\min\{m,n\}$…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
Bundling, the practice of jointly selling two or more products at a discount, is a widely used strategy in industry and a well examined concept in academia. Historically, the focus has been on theoretical studies in the context of…
A principal wishes to transact business with a multidimensional distribution of agents whose preferences are known only in the aggregate. Assuming a twist (= generalized Spence-Mirrlees single-crossing) hypothesis and that agents can choose…
In two-sided matching markets, ensuring both stability and strategy-proofness poses a significant challenge; it is impossible when agents' preferences are unrestricted. But what if agents' preferences have specific restricted structures?…
We consider a setting where $n$ buyers, with combinatorial preferences over $m$ items, and a seller, running a priority-based allocation mechanism, repeatedly interact. Our goal, from observing limited information about the results of these…
A simple model of a buying-selling cycle is proposed. The model comprises two moves: a rational buying and a random selling. The notion of a profit intensity is introduced. Supply and demand curves and geometrical interpretation are…
We study the problem of modeling purchase of multiple products and utilizing it to display optimized recommendations for online retailers and e-commerce platforms. We present a parsimonious multi-purchase family of choice models called the…
We analyze a nonlinear pricing model where the seller controls both product pricing (screening) and buyer information about their own values (persuasion). We prove that the optimal mechanism always consists of finitely many signals and…
We study a repeated trading problem in which a mechanism designer facilitates trade between a single seller and multiple buyers. Our model generalizes the classic bilateral trade setting to a multi-buyer environment. Specifically, the…
We consider multi-item exchange markets in which agents want to receive one of their target bundles of resources. The model encompasses well-studied markets for kidney exchange, lung exchange, and multi-organ exchange. We identify a general…
A menu description exposes strategyproofness by presenting a mechanism to player $i$ in two steps. Step (1) uses others' reports to describe $i$'s menu of potential outcomes. Step (2) uses $i$'s report to select $i$'s favorite outcome from…
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…
Consider the object allocation (one-sided matching) model of Shapley and Scarf (1974). When final allocations are observed but agents' preferences are unknown, when might the allocation be in the core? This is a one-sided analogue of the…
A monopolist sells multiple goods to an uninformed buyer. The buyer chooses to learn any one-dimensional linear signal of their values for the goods, anticipating the seller's mechanism. The seller designs an optimal mechanism, anticipating…
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…
For Bayesian combinatorial auctions, we present a general framework for approximately reducing the mechanism design problem for multiple buyers to single buyer sub-problems. Our framework can be applied to any setting which roughly…