Related papers: Approximate Revenue from Finite Range Mechanisms

We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…

Catering to the incentives of people with limited rationality is a challenging research direction that requires novel paradigms to design mechanisms and approximation algorithms. Obviously strategyproof (OSP) mechanisms have recently…

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…

We study the two-agent single-item bilateral trade. Ideally, the trade should happen whenever the buyer's value for the item exceeds the seller's cost. However, the classical result of Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that no mechanism can…

In this paper, we present the first approximation algorithms for the problem of designing revenue optimal Bayesian incentive compatible auctions when there are multiple (heterogeneous) items and when bidders can have arbitrary demand and…

We analyze the revenue loss due to market shrinkage. Specifically, consider a simple market with one item for sale and $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from some joint distribution. Suppose that the market shrinks as a single bidder…

We consider (approximate) revenue maximization in auctions where the distribution on input valuations is given via "black box" access to samples from the distribution. We observe that the number of samples required -- the sample complexity…

We propose a simple randomized rule for the optimization of prices in revenue management with contextual information. It is known that the certainty equivalent pricing rule, albeit popular, is sub-optimal. We show that, by allowing a small…

We study the problem of a budget limited buyer who wants to buy a set of items, each from a different seller, to maximize her value. The budget feasible mechanism design problem aims to design a mechanism which incentivizes the sellers to…

A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…

We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…

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.…

Hybrid automata are a natural framework for modeling and analyzing systems which exhibit a mixed discrete continuous behaviour. However, the standard operational semantics defined over such models implicitly assume perfect knowledge of the…

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…

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…

We consider the Item Pricing problem for revenue maximization in the limited supply setting, where a single seller with $n$ items caters to $m$ buyers with unknown subadditive valuation functions who arrive in a sequence. The seller sets…

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…

Data regulations increasingly enable consumers to switch among market segments, making segmentation an endogenous outcome of strategic interaction. We study a model in which consumers choose segments before a monopolist sets…

We introduce the notion of rigidity in auction design and use it to analyze some fundamental aspects of mechanism design. We focus on single-item auctions where the values of the bidders are drawn from some (possibly correlated)…

We study a sequential decision-making model where a set of items is repeatedly matched to the same set of agents over multiple rounds. The objective is to determine a sequence of matchings that either maximizes the utility of the least…