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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…
Assortment optimization concerns the problem of selling items with fixed prices to a buyer who will purchase at most one. Typically, retailers select a subset of items, corresponding to an "assortment" of brands to carry, and make each…
We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
We provide sufficient conditions for revenue maximization in a two-good monopoly where the buyer's values for the items come from independent (but not necessarily identical) distributions over bounded intervals. Under certain distributional…
We consider the problem of designing an expected-revenue maximizing mechanism for allocating multiple non-perishable goods of $k$ varieties to flexible consumers over $T$ time steps. In our model, a random number of goods of each variety…
We study a classic Bayesian mechanism design setting of monopoly problem for an additive buyer in the presence of budgets. In this setting a monopolist seller with $m$ heterogeneous items faces a single buyer and seeks to maximize her…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
Strategic product placement can have a strong influence on customer purchase behavior in physical stores as well as online platforms. Motivated by this, we consider the problem of optimizing the placement of substitutable products in…
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…
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…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
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,…
We study revenue maximization by deterministic mechanisms for the simplest case for which Myerson's characterization does not hold: a single seller selling two items, with independently distributed values, to a single additive buyer. We…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
I study the welfare-maximizing allocation of heterogeneous goods when monetary transfers are prohibited. Agents have private values, and the designer chooses a mechanism subject to incentive compatibility and aggregate supply constraints. I…
We consider a dynamic mechanism design problem where an auctioneer sells an indivisible good to groups of buyers in every round, for a total of $T$ rounds. The auctioneer aims to maximize their discounted overall revenue while adhering to a…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…