Related papers: Rank-Guaranteed Auctions
We study the power of item-pricing as a tool for approximately optimizing social welfare in a combinatorial market. We consider markets with $m$ indivisible items and $n$ buyers. The goal is to set prices to the items so that, when agents…
We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…
We revisit the problem of designing the profit-maximizing single-item auction, solved by Myerson in his seminal paper for the case in which bidder valuations are independently distributed. We focus on general joint distributions, seeking…
We provide a Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for the Bayesian optimal multi-item multi-bidder auction problem under two conditions. First, bidders are independent, have additive valuations and are from the same population.…
We study auctions that are robust at any scale, i.e., they can be applied to sell both expensive and cheap items and achieve the best multiplicative approximations of the optimal revenue in the worst case. We show that the optimal mechanism…
Cyber defense operations increasingly require long-term strategic planning under uncertainty and resource constraints. We propose a new use of combinatorial auctions for allocating defensive action bundles in a realistic cyber environment,…
One of the most celebrated results in mechanism design is Myerson's characterization of the revenue optimal auction for selling a single item. However, this result relies heavily on the assumption that buyers are indifferent to risk. In…
We perform a simulation-based analysis of keyword auctions modeled as one-shot games of incomplete information to study a series of mechanism design questions. Our first question addresses the degree to which incentive compatibility fails…
In a combinatorial exchange setting, players place sell (resp. buy) bids on combinations of traded goods. Besides the question of finding an optimal selection of winning bids, the question of how to share the obtained profit is of high…
The competitive auction was first proposed by Goldberg, Hartline, and Wright. In their paper, they introduce the competitive analysis framework of online algorithm designing into the traditional revenue-maximizing auction design problem.…
In online combinatorial allocations/auctions, n bidders sequentially arrive, each with a combinatorial valuation (such as submodular/XOS) over subsets of m indivisible items. The aim is to immediately allocate a subset of the remaining…
We study the equilibria of uniform price auctions where many asymmetric bidders have flat demands up to their respective quantity constraints. We present an iterative procedure that systematically finds an equilibrium outcome as well as an…
This work presents a descending-price-auction algorithm to obtain the maximum market-clearing price vector (MCP) in unit-demand matching markets with m items by exploiting the combinatorial structure. With a shrewd choice of goods for which…
The enhanced competition paradigm is an attempt at bridging the gap between simple and optimal auctions. In this line of work, given an auction setting with $m$ items and $n$ bidders, the goal is to find the smallest $n' \geq n$ such that…
Online Resource Allocation addresses the problem of efficiently allocating limited resources to buyers with incomplete knowledge of future requests. In our setting, buyers arrive sequentially requesting a set of items, each with a value…
We study the communication complexity of welfare maximization in combinatorial auctions with $m$ items and two subadditive bidders. A $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation can be guaranteed by a trivial randomized protocol with zero communication, or…
Commercial entries, such as hotels, are ranked according to score by a search engine or recommendation system, and the score of each can be improved upon by making a targeted investment, e.g., advertising. We study the problem of how a…
Many popular search engines run an auction to determine the placement of advertisements next to search results. Current auctions at Google and Yahoo! let advertisers specify a single amount as their bid in the auction. This bid is…
We show that the multiplicative weight update method provides a simple recipe for designing and analyzing optimal Bayesian Incentive Compatible (BIC) auctions, and reduces the time complexity of the problem to pseudo-polynomial in…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…