Related papers: Approximate Revenue from Finite Range Mechanisms
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
This paper settles the sample complexity of single-parameter revenue maximization by showing matching upper and lower bounds, up to a poly-logarithmic factor, for all families of value distributions that have been considered in the…
A recent approach to automated mechanism design, differentiable economics, represents auctions by rich function approximators and optimizes their performance by gradient descent. The ideal auction architecture for differentiable economics…
Buying and selling of data online has increased substantially over the last few years. Several frameworks have already been proposed that study query pricing in theory and practice. The key guiding principle in these works is the notion of…
This paper considers Bayesian revenue maximization in the $k$-unit setting, where a monopolist seller has $k$ copies of an indivisible item and faces $n$ unit-demand buyers (whose value distributions can be non-identical). Four basic…
The assortment problem in revenue management is the problem of deciding which subset of products to offer to consumers in order to maximise revenue. A simple and natural strategy is to select the best assortment out of all those that are…
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 consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $n$ items facing a single buyer. We introduce the notion of symmetric menu complexity of a mechanism, which counts the number of distinct options the buyer may purchase, up to permutations of the…
We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of…
We consider one buyer and one seller. For a bundle $(t,q)\in [0,\infty[\times [0,1]=\mathbb{Z}$, $q$ either refers to the wining probability of an object or a share of a good, and $t$ denotes the payment that the buyer makes. We define…
Sequence models are a critical component of modern NLP systems, but their predictions are difficult to explain. We consider model explanations though rationales, subsets of context that can explain individual model predictions. We find…
We consider the revenue maximization problem for an online retailer who plans to display in order a set of products differing in their prices and qualities. Consumers have attention spans, i.e., the maximum number of products they are…
We consider multi-item exchange markets in which agents want to receive one of their target bundles of resources. The model encompasses well-studied markets for kidney exchange, lung exchange, and multi-organ exchange. We identify a general…
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,…
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…
What fraction of the potential social surplus in an environment can be extracted by a revenue-maximizing monopolist? We investigate this problem in Bayesian single-parameter environments with independent private values. The precise answer…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with a large number of items $m$ for sale to $n$ strategic bidders, whose valuations are drawn independently from high-dimensional, unknown prior distributions. It is well-known that…
We consider optimal mechanism design for the case with one buyer and two items. The buyer's valuations towards the two items are independent and additive. In this setting, optimal mechanism is unknown for general valuation distributions. We…
Using AI approaches to automatically design mechanisms has been a central research mission at the interface of AI and economics [Conitzer and Sandholm, 2002]. Previous approaches that attempt to design revenue optimal auctions for the…