Related papers: Undominated monopoly regulation
We study monopoly regulation under asymmetric information about costs when subsidies are infeasible. A monopolist with privately known marginal cost serves a single product market and sets a price. The regulator maximizes a weighted welfare…
We study the regulation of a monopolistic firm using a robust-design approach. We solve for the policy that minimizes the regulator's worst-case regret, where the regret is the difference between his complete-information payoff minus his…
Quantifying energy flows at nanometer scales promises to guide future research in a variety of disciplines, from microscopic control and manipulation, to autonomously operating molecular machines. A general understanding of the…
We study how to optimally segment monopolistic markets with a redistributive objective. We characterize optimal redistributive segmentations and show that they (i) induce the seller to price progressively, i.e., charge richer consumers…
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
The family of Groves mechanisms, which includes the well-known VCG mechanism (also known as the Clarke mechanism), is a family of efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms. Unfortunately, the Groves mechanisms are generally not budget…
Pricing decisions are often made when market information is still poor. In turn, existing theoretical models often reason about the response of optimal prices to changing market characteristics without exploiting all available information…
Problem definition: Traditional monopoly pricing assumes sellers have full information about consumer valuations. We consider monopoly pricing under limited information, where a seller only knows the mean, variance and support of the…
A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…
We characterize optimal mechanisms for the multiple-good monopoly problem and provide a framework to find them. We show that a mechanism is optimal if and only if a measure $\mu$ derived from the buyer's type distribution satisfies certain…
Properties of systems with majority voting rules have been exhaustingly studied. In this work we focus on the randomized case - where the system is initialized by randomized initial set of seeds. Our main aim is to give an asymptotic…
We prove a general existence result in stochastic optimal control in discrete time where controls take values in conditional metric spaces, and depend on the current state and the information of past decisions through the evolution of a…
We study multi-product monopoly pricing where the seller jointly designs the selling mechanism and the information structure for the buyer to learn his values. Unlike the case with exogenous information, we show that when the seller…
In this paper, we describe a constrained Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalism for the optimal control of nonholonomic mechanical systems. In particular, we aim to minimize a cost functional, given initial and final conditions where the…
Statistical mechanics provides a useful analog for understanding the behavior of complex adaptive systems, including electric power markets and the power systems they intend to govern. Market-based control is founded on the conjecture that…
A common objective in mechanism design is to choose the outcome (for example, allocation of resources) that maximizes the sum of the agents' valuations, without introducing incentives for agents to misreport their preferences. The class of…
We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…
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…
We consider a control problem constrained by the unsteady stochastic Stokes equations with nonhomogeneous boundary conditions in connected and bounded domains. In this paper, controls are defined inside the domain as well as on the…
We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…