Related papers: Time-Varyingness in Auction Breaks Revenue Equival…
We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue,…
We study the revenue comparison problem of auctions when the seller has a maxmin expected utility preference. The seller holds a set of priors around some reference belief, interpreted as an approximating model of the true probability law…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
Since economic mechanisms are often applied to very different instances of the same problem, it is desirable to identify mechanisms that work well in a wide range of circumstances. We pursue this goal for a position auction setting and…
The transition of display ad exchanges from second-price auctions (SPA) to first-price auctions (FPA) has raised questions about its impact on revenue. Auction theory predicts the revenue equivalence between these two auction formats.…
The first-price auction is popular in practice for its simplicity and transparency. Moreover, its potential virtues grow in complex settings where incentive compatible auctions may generate little or no revenue. Unfortunately, the…
The internet advertising market is a multi-billion dollar industry, in which advertisers buy thousands of ad placements every day by repeatedly participating in auctions. An important and ubiquitous feature of these auctions is the presence…
In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…
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…
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…
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…
Sequential auctions for identical items with unit-demand, private-value buyers are common and often occur periodically without end, as new bidders replace departing ones. We model bidder uncertainty by introducing a probability that a…
Mature internet advertising platforms offer high-level campaign management tools to help advertisers run their campaigns, often abstracting away the intricacies of how each ad is placed and focusing on aggregate metrics of interest to…
Throttling is a popular method of budget management for online ad auctions in which the platform modulates the participation probability of an advertiser in order to smoothly spend her budget across many auctions. In this work, we…
I establish nonparametric identification results in first- and second-price auctions when transaction prices are truncated by a binding reserve price under a range of information structures. When the number of potential bidders is fixed and…
Simultaneous item auctions are simple procedures for allocating items to bidders with potentially complex preferences over different item sets. In a simultaneous auction, every bidder submits bids on all items simultaneously. The allocation…
We study multidimensional mechanism design in a common scenario where players have private information about their willingness to pay and their ability to pay. We provide a complete characterization of dominant-strategy incentive-compatible…
We study a setting where agents use no-regret learning algorithms to participate in repeated auctions. \citet{kolumbus2022auctions} showed, rather surprisingly, that when bidders participate in second-price auctions using no-regret bidding…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
We examine ``tournament'' second-price auctions in which $N$ bidders compete for the right to participate in a second stage and contend against bidder $N+1$. When the first $N$ bidders are committed so that their bids cannot be changed in…