Related papers: Optimal Procurement Design: A Reduced-Form Approac…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
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…
This paper studies some basic problems in a multiple-object auction model using methodologies from theoretical computer science. We are especially concerned with situations where an adversary bidder knows the bidding algorithms of all the…
Augmenting the input of algorithms with predictions is an algorithm design paradigm that suggests leveraging a (possibly erroneous) prediction to improve worst-case performance guarantees when the prediction is perfect (consistency), while…
In an online contract selection problem there is a seller which offers a set of contracts to sequentially arriving buyers whose types are drawn from an unknown distribution. If there exists a profitable contract for the buyer in the offered…
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…
We consider budget feasible mechanisms for procurement auctions with additive valuation functions. For the divisible case, where agents can be allocated fractionally, there exists an optimal mechanism with approximation guarantee $e/(e-1)$…
A monopolist seller of multiple goods screens a buyer whose type is initially unknown to both but drawn from a commonly known distribution. The buyer privately learns about his type via a signal. We derive the seller's optimal mechanism in…
Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…
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…
We study sequential procurement auctions where the sellers are provided with a ``best and final offer'' (BAFO) strategy. This strategy allows each seller $i$ to effectively ``freeze'' their price while remaining active in the auction, and…
We study procurement auctions, where an auctioneer seeks to acquire services from strategic sellers with private costs. The quality of services is measured by a submodular function known to the auctioneer. Our goal is to design…
We study the optimal mechanism design problem faced by a market intermediary who makes revenue by connecting buyers and sellers. We first show that the optimal intermediation protocol has substantial structure: it is the solution to an…
We study the revenue-maximizing mechanism when a buyer's value evolves endogenously because of learning-by-consuming. A seller sells one unit of a divisible good, while the buyer relies on his private, rough valuation to choose his…
We propose a new efficient online algorithm to learn the parameters governing the purchasing behavior of a utility maximizing buyer, who responds to prices, in a repeated interaction setting. The key feature of our algorithm is that it can…
We study a basic auction design problem with online supply. There are two unit-demand bidders and two types of items. The first item type will arrive first for sure, and the second item type may or may not arrive. The auctioneer has to…
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…
We consider the problem of an auctioneer who faces the task of selling a good (drawn from a known distribution) to a set of buyers, when the auctioneer does not have the capacity to describe to the buyers the exact identity of the good that…
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…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…