Related papers: The Simplicity of Optimal Dynamic Mechanisms
We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed…
Minimizing the peak power consumption and matching demand to supply, under fixed threshold polices, are two key requirements for the success of the future electricity market. In this work, we consider dynamic pricing methods to minimize the…
We study the asymptotic average-case efficiency of static and anonymous posted prices for $n$ agents and $m(n)$ multiple identical items with $m(n)=o\left(\frac{n}{\log n}\right)$. When valuations are drawn i.i.d from some fixed continuous…
We study revenue maximization through sequential posted-price (SPP) mechanisms in single-dimensional settings with $n$ buyers and independent but not necessarily identical value distributions. We construct the SPP mechanisms by considering…
Motivated by applications such as cloud computing, gig platforms, and blockchain auctions, we study optimal selling mechanisms for dynamic markets with stochastic supply and demand. In our model, buyers with private valuations and…
Dynamic pricing is commonly used to regulate congestion in shared service systems. This paper is motivated by the fact that in the presence of users with varying price sensitivity (responsiveness), conventional monotonic pricing can lead to…
The revenue optimal mechanism for selling a single item to agents with independent but non-identically distributed values is complex for agents with linear utility (Myerson,1981) and has no closed-form characterization for agents with…
Market makers provide liquidity to other market participants: they propose prices at which they stand ready to buy and sell a wide variety of assets. They face a complex optimization problem with both static and dynamic components. They…
A novel high-frequency market-making approach in discrete time is proposed that admits closed-form solutions. By taking advantage of demand functions that are linear in the quoted bid and ask spreads with random coefficients, we model the…
We study the optimal mechanism design problem faced by a market intermediary who makes revenue by connecting buyers and sellers. We first show that the optimal intermediation protocol has substantial structure: it is the solution to an…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…
Problem definition: We study a data-driven pricing problem in which a seller sets a price for a single item based on demand observed at a limited number of historical prices. Our goal is to quantify the value of such information and to…
We obtain revenue guarantees for the simple pricing mechanism of a single posted price, in terms of a natural parameter of the distribution of buyers' valuations. Our revenue guarantee applies to the single item n buyers setting, with…
We efficiently solve the optimal multi-dimensional mechanism design problem for independent bidders with arbitrary demand constraints when either the number of bidders is a constant or the number of items is a constant. In the first…
Finding the optimal (revenue-maximizing) mechanism to sell multiple items has been a prominent and notoriously difficult open problem. Existing work has mainly focused on deriving analytical results tailored to a particular class of…
We consider optimal mechanism design for the case with one buyer and two items. The buyer's valuations towards the two items are independent and additive. In this setting, optimal mechanism is unknown for general valuation distributions. We…
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…
An auction house cannot generally provide the optimal auction technology to every client. Instead it provides one or several auction technologies, and clients select the most appropriate one. For example, eBay provides ascending auctions…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…