Related papers: Selling an Item through Persuasion
In mechanism design theory, agents' types are described as their private information, and the designer may reveal some public information to affect agents' types in order to obtain more payoffs. Traditionally, each agent's private type and…
A special case of Myerson's classic result describes the revenue-optimal equilibrium when a seller offers a single item to a buyer. We study a repeated sales extension of this model: a seller offers to sell a single fresh copy of an item to…
A seller wants to sell an item to $n$ buyers. Buyer valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution unknown to the seller; the seller only knows that the support is included in $[a, b]$. To be robust, the seller chooses a DSIC mechanism…
I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…
A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct…
On ad exchange platforms the place for advertisement is sold through different kinds of auctions. However, it is not uncommon the situation where the seller repeatedly encounters only one buyer, thus the posted price auction degenerates…
We study the optimal pricing strategies of a monopolist selling a divisible good (service) to consumers that are embedded in a social network. A key feature of our model is that consumers experience a (positive) local network effect. 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…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
When selling many goods with independent valuations, we develop a distributionally robust framework, consisting of a two-player game between seller and nature. The seller has only limited knowledge about the value distribution. The seller…
We provide an elementary proof that revenue-maximizing mechanisms exist in multi-parameter settings whenever the distribution of valuations has finite expectation.
We study a single-buyer pricing problem with unreliable side information, motivated by the increasing use of AI-assisted decision-making and LLM-based predictions. The seller observes a private sample that may be either accurate (coinciding…
Online platforms collect rich information about participants and then share some of this information back with them to improve market outcomes. In this paper we study the following information disclosure problem in two-sided markets: If a…
We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…
We study revenue optimization pricing algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation. We show that, in the case when both the seller and the buyer…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…
A sender with private preferences would like to influence a receiver's action by providing information through a statistical test. The technology for information production is controlled by a monopolist intermediary, who offers a menu of…
Problem definition: Traditional monopoly pricing assumes sellers have full information about consumer valuations. We consider monopoly pricing under limited information, where a seller only knows the mean, variance and support of the…
A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…