Related papers: Auction theory and demography
In markets where algorithmic data processing is increasingly prevalent, recommendation algorithms can substantially affect trade and welfare. We consider a setting in which an algorithm recommends a product based on its value to the buyer…
In this paper, we study sequential auctions with two budget constrained bidders and any number of identical items. All prior results on such auctions consider only two items. We construct a canonical outcome of the auction that is the only…
Consider the problem of allocating goods to buyers through an auction. An auction is efficient if the resulting allocation maximizes total welfare, conditional on the information available. If buyers have private values, the…
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…
On ad exchange platforms the place for advertisement is sold through different kinds of auctions. However, it is not uncommon the situation where the seller repeatedly encounters only one buyer, thus the posted price auction degenerates…
A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…
In various markets where sellers compete in price, price oscillations are observed rather than convergence to equilibrium. Such fluctuations have been empirically observed in the retail market for gasoline, in airline pricing and in the…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
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…
All-pay auctions, a common mechanism for various human and agent interactions, suffers, like many other mechanisms, from the possibility of players' failure to participate in the auction. We model such failures, and fully characterize…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
We study scenarios where multiple sellers of a homogeneous good compete on prices, where each seller can only sell to some subset of the buyers. Crucially, sellers cannot price-discriminate between buyers. We model the structure of the…
We study the optimal placement of advertisements for interactive platforms like conversational AI assistants. Importantly, conversations add a feature absent in canonical search markets -- time. The evolution of a conversation is…
Auctions are important mechanisms extensively implemented in various markets, e.g., search engines' keyword auctions, antique auctions, etc. Finding an optimal auction mechanism is extremely difficult due to the constraints of imperfect…
Information in the form of data, which can be stored and transferred between users, can be viewed as an intangible commodity, which can be traded in exchange for money. Determining the fair price at which a string of data should be traded…
The issue of fairness in AI arises from discriminatory practices in applications like job recommendations and risk assessments, emphasising the need for algorithms that do not discriminate based on group characteristics. This concern is…
We study the range of prices at which a rational agent should contemplate transacting a financial contract outside a given securities market. Trading is subject to nonproportional transaction costs and portfolio constraints and full…
We study the necessity of interaction between individuals for obtaining approximately efficient allocations. The role of interaction in markets has received significant attention in economic thinking, e.g. in Hayek's 1945 classic paper. We…
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 statistical generalization is made of microeconomics in the spirit of going from classical to statistical mechanics. The price and quantity of every commodity1 traded in the market, at each instant of time, is considered to be an…