Related papers: Approximately Efficient Bilateral Trade with Sampl…
We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
We examine information structure design, also called "persuasion" or "signaling", in the presence of a constraint on the amount of communication. We focus on the fundamental setting of bilateral trade, which in its simplest form involves a…
We consider the provision of an abstract service to single-dimensional agents. Our model includes position auctions, single-minded combinatorial auctions, and constrained matching markets. When the agents' values are drawn from a…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
Walrasian prices, if they exist, have the property that one can assign every buyer some bundle in her demand set, such that the resulting assignment will maximize social welfare. Unfortunately, this assumes carefully breaking ties amongst…
Bilateral trade, a fundamental topic in economics, models the problem of intermediating between two strategic agents, a seller and a buyer, willing to trade a good for which they hold private valuations. Despite the simplicity of this…
Bilateral trade models the task of intermediating between two strategic agents, a seller and a buyer, willing to trade a good for which they hold private valuations. We study this problem from the perspective of a broker, in a regret…
Empirical evidence suggests that even the most competitive markets are not strictly efficient. Price histories can be used to predict near future returns with a probability better than random chance. Many markets can be considered as {\it…
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 study the problem of selling information to a data-buyer who faces a decision problem under uncertainty. We consider the classic Bayesian decision-theoretic model pioneered by [Blackwell, 1951, 1953]. Initially, the data buyer has only…
We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…
In revenue maximization of selling a digital product in a social network, the utility of an agent is often considered to have two parts: a private valuation, and linearly additive influences from other agents. We study the incomplete…
Multi-unit auctions are a paradigmatic model, where a seller brings multiple units of a good, while several buyers bring monetary endowments. It is well known that Walrasian equilibria do not always exist in this model, however compelling…
In this work we are concerned with the design of efficient mechanisms while eliciting limited information from the agents. First, we study the performance of sampling approximations in facility location games. Our key result is to show that…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
There is only one technique for prior-free optimal mechanism design that generalizes beyond the structurally benevolent setting of digital goods. This technique uses random sampling to estimate the distribution of agent values and then…
We explore the effects of social influence in a simple market model in which a large number of agents face a binary choice: 'to buy/not to buy' a single unit of a product at a price posted by a single seller (the monopoly case). We consider…
We study efficiency loss in Bayesian revenue optimal auctions. We quantify this as the worst case ratio of loss in the realized social welfare to the social welfare that can be realized by an efficient auction. Our focus is on auctions with…
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…