Related papers: Rank-Guaranteed Auctions
The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…
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 $\min\{m,n\}$…
In this paper, we show a tight approximation guarantee for budget-feasible mechanisms with an additive buyer. We propose a new simple randomized mechanism with approximation ratio of $2$, improving the previous best known result of $3$. Our…
A recent approach to automated mechanism design, differentiable economics, represents auctions by rich function approximators and optimizes their performance by gradient descent. The ideal auction architecture for differentiable economics…
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…
We show that a competitive equilibrium always exists in combinatorial auctions with anonymous graphical valuations and pricing, using discrete geometry. This is an intuitive and easy-to-construct class of valuations that can model both…
In a sponsored search auction, decisions about how to rank ads impose tradeoffs between objectives such as revenue and welfare. In this paper, we examine how these tradeoffs should be made. We begin by arguing that the most natural solution…
We study revenue maximization in multi-item auctions, where bidders have subadditive valuations over independent items. Providing a simple mechanism that is approximately revenue-optimal in this setting is a major open problem in mechanism…
We study a general online combinatorial auction problem in algorithmic mechanism design. A provider allocates multiple types of capacity-limited resources to customers that arrive in a sequential and arbitrary manner. Each customer has a…
In this note we study the greedy algorithm for combinatorial auctions with submodular bidders. It is well known that this algorithm provides an approximation ratio of $2$ for every order of the items. We show that if the valuations are…
Combinatorial auctions are formulated as frustrated lattice gases on sparse random graphs, allowing the determination of the optimal revenue by methods of statistical physics. Transitions between computationally easy and hard regimes are…
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
Designing an incentive-compatible auction mechanism that maximizes the auctioneer's revenue while minimizes the bidders' ex-post regret is an important yet intricate problem in economics. Remarkable progress has been achieved through…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
Along with substantial progress made recently in designing near-optimal mechanisms for multi-item auctions, interesting structural questions have also been raised and studied. In particular, is it true that the seller can always extract…
Motivated by autobidding systems in online advertising, we study revenue maximization in markets with divisible goods and budget-constrained buyers with linear valuations. Our aim is to compute a single price for each good and an allocation…
We introduce draft auctions, which is a sequential auction format where at each iteration players bid for the right to buy items at a fixed price. We show that draft auctions offer an exponential improvement in social welfare at equilibrium…
Combinatorial auctions (CA) are a well-studied area in algorithmic mechanism design. However, contrary to the standard model, empirical studies suggest that a bidder's valuation often does not depend solely on the goods assigned to him. For…
Assortment optimization refers to the problem of designing a slate of products to offer potential customers, such as stocking the shelves in a convenience store. The price of each product is fixed in advance, and a probabilistic choice…