Related papers: The Role of Prescreening in Auctions with Predicti…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
We study auction design when a seller relies on machine-learning predictions of bidders' valuations that may be unreliable. Motivated by modern ML systems that are often accurate but occasionally fail in a way that is essentially…
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 single unit of a good is sold to one of two bidders. Each bidder has either a high prior valuation or a low prior valuation for the good. Their prior valuations are independently and identically distributed. Each bidder may observe an…
With the increasing use of auctions in online advertising, there has been a large effort to study seller revenue maximization, following Myerson's seminal work, both theoretically and practically. We take the point of view of the buyer in…
A speculator can take advantage of a procurement auction by acquiring items for sale before the auction. The accumulated market power can then be exercised in the auction and may lead to a large enough gain to cover the acquisition costs. I…
In a multiple-object auction, every bidder tries to win as many objects as possible with a bidding algorithm. This paper studies position-randomized auctions, which form a special class of multiple-object auctions where a bidding algorithm…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
In classic auction theory, reserve prices are known to be effective for improving revenue for the auctioneer against quasi-linear utility maximizing bidders. The introduction of reserve prices, however, usually do not help improve total…
Shilling is the use of artificial bids to make competition appear stronger and push prices upward. We study repeated first-price auctions in which shilling affects feedback but not allocation: the learner wins or loses against the real…
This paper studies inference in first-price and second-price sealed-bid auctions with many bidders, using an asymptotic framework where the number of bidders increases while the number of auctions remains fixed. Our approach enables…
High-stakes auctions are often preceded by nonbinding communication between bidders and the seller. Motivated by these practices, this paper examines a two-period model in which two bidders send private cheap talk messages to the seller…
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…
We consider auction environments in which at the time of the auction bidders observe signals about their ex-post value. We introduce a model of novice bidders who do not know know the joint distribution of signals and instead build a…
The standard framework of online bidding algorithm design assumes that the seller commits himself to faithfully implementing the rules of the adopted auction. However, the seller may attempt to cheat in execution to increase his revenue if…
Online auctions play a central role in online advertising, and are one of the main reasons for the industry's scalability and growth. With great changes in how auctions are being organized, such as changing the second- to first-price…
We study the problem of auction design for advertising platforms that face strategic advertisers who are bidding across platforms. Each advertiser's goal is to maximize their total value or conversions while satisfying some constraint(s)…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to possess…