Related papers: Selling an Item through Persuasion

We study how to optimally segment monopolistic markets with a redistributive objective. We characterize optimal redistributive segmentations and show that they (i) induce the seller to price progressively, i.e., charge richer consumers…

Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…

Diffusion auction design is a new trend in mechanism design for which the main goal is to incentivize existing buyers to invite new buyers, who are their neighbors on a social network, to join an auction even though they are competitors.…

We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…

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…

Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…

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…

We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…

We study robust mechanisms to sell a common-value good. We assume that the mechanism designer knows the prior distribution of the buyers' common value but is unsure of the buyers' information structure about the common value. We use linear…

We consider the design of a revenue-optimal mechanism when two items are available to be sold to a single buyer whose valuation is uniformly distributed over an arbitrary rectangle $[c_1,c_1+b_1]\times[c_2,c_2+b_2]$ in the positive…

We consider a mechanism design setting with a single item and a single buyer who is uncertain about the value of the item. Both the buyer and the seller have a common model for the buyer's value, but the buyer discovers her true value only…

We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…

A seller offers a buyer a schedule of transfers and associated product qualities. After observing this schedule, the buyer chooses a flexible costly signal about his type. We show it is without loss to focus on a class of mechanisms that…

Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…

We study market interactions in which buyers are allowed to credibly reveal partial information about their types to the seller. Previous recent work has studied the special case of one buyer and one good, showing that such communication…

We provide a new, much simplified and straightforward proof to a result of Pavlov [2011] regarding the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling two goods with uniformly i.i.d. valuations over intervals $[c,c+1]$, to an additive buyer. This…

We consider the problem of repeatedly auctioning a single item to multiple i.i.d buyers who each use a no-regret learning algorithm to bid over time. In particular, we study the seller's optimal revenue, if they know that the buyers are…

I study a model of advisors with hidden motives: a seller discloses information about an object's value to a potential buyer, who doesn't know the object's value or how profitable the object's sale is to the seller (the seller's motives). I…

We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…

There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by…