Related papers: Selling an Item through Persuasion

We study a robust selling problem where a seller attempts to sell one item to a buyer but is uncertain about the buyer's valuation distribution. Existing literature shows that robust screening provides a stronger theoretical guarantee than…

Multi-item mechanisms can be very complex offering many different bundles to the buyer that could even be randomized. Such complexity is thought to be necessary as the revenue gaps between randomized and deterministic mechanisms, or…

A fundamental assumption in classical mechanism design is that buyers are perfect optimizers. However, in practice, buyers may be limited by their computational capabilities or a lack of information, and may not be able to perfectly…

A seller posts a price for a single object. The seller's and buyer's values may be interdependent. We characterize the set of payoff vectors across all information structures. Simple feasibility and individual-rationality constraints…

We study information design settings where the designer controls information about a state, and there are multiple agents interacting in a game who are privately informed about their types. Each agent's utility depends on all agents' types…

A ubiquitous learning problem in today's digital market is, during repeated interactions between a seller and a buyer, how a seller can gradually learn optimal pricing decisions based on the buyer's past purchase responses. A fundamental…

We study the multi-item mechanism design problem where a monopolist sells $n$ heterogeneous items to a single buyer. We focus on buy-many mechanisms, a natural class of mechanisms frequently used in practice. The buy-many property allows…

A rapidly growing literature on lying in behavioral economics and psychology shows that individuals often do not lie even when lying maximizes their utility. In this work, we attempt to incorporate these findings into the theory of…

We design a fixed-price auction mechanism for a seller to sell multiple items in a tree-structured market. The buyers have independently drawn valuation from a uniform distribution, and the seller would like to incentivize buyers to invite…

We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…

We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…

This paper studies an auction design problem for a seller to sell a commodity in a social network, where each individual (the seller or a buyer) can only communicate with her neighbors. The challenge to the seller is to design a mechanism…

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…

Motivated by the recent popularity of machine learning training services, we introduce a contract design problem in which a provider sells a service that results in an outcome of uncertain quality for the buyer. The seller has a set of…

Bayesian persuasion studies how an informed sender should partially disclose information so as to influence the behavior of self-interested receivers. In the last years, a growing attention has been devoted to relaxing the assumption that…

We investigate a seller's revenue-maximizing mechanism in a setting where a desirable good is sold together with an undesirable bad (e.g., advertisements) that generates third-party revenue. The buyer's private information is…

Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…

Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic…

In this research, we study the problem that a collector acquires items from the owner based on the item qualities the owner declares and an independent appraiser's assessments. The owner is interested in maximizing the probability that the…

The optimal pricing problem is a fundamental problem that arises in combinatorial auctions. Suppose that there is one seller who has indivisible items and multiple buyers who want to purchase a combination of the items. The seller wants to…