Related papers: A Tale of Two Monopolies

We study robust mechanisms to sell a common-value good. We assume that the mechanism designer knows the prior distribution of the buyers' common value but is unsure of the buyers' information structure about the common value. We use linear…

We provide a new, much simplified and straightforward proof to a result of Pavlov [2011] regarding the revenue maximizing mechanism for selling two goods with uniformly i.i.d. valuations over intervals $[c,c+1]$, to an additive buyer. This…

We study the problem of characterizing revenue optimal auctions for single-minded buyers. Each buyer is interested only in a specific bundle of items and has a value for the same. Both his bundle and its value are his private information.…

We study the multi-item mechanism design problem where a monopolist sells $n$ heterogeneous items to a single buyer. We focus on buy-many mechanisms, a natural class of mechanisms frequently used in practice. The buy-many property allows…

In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…

We study multidimensional mechanism design in a common scenario where players have private information about their willingness to pay and their ability to pay. We provide a complete characterization of dominant-strategy incentive-compatible…

We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…

Designing revenue optimal auctions for selling an item to $n$ symmetric bidders is a fundamental problem in mechanism design. Myerson (1981) shows that the second price auction with an appropriate reserve price is optimal when bidders'…

I study the welfare-maximizing allocation of heterogeneous goods when monetary transfers are prohibited. Agents have private values, and the designer chooses a mechanism subject to incentive compatibility and aggregate supply constraints. I…

Multi-item mechanisms can be very complex offering many different bundles to the buyer that could even be randomized. Such complexity is thought to be necessary as the revenue gaps between randomized and deterministic mechanisms, or…

We provide an elementary proof that revenue-maximizing mechanisms exist in multi-parameter settings whenever the distribution of valuations has finite expectation.

We study large markets with a single seller which can produce many types of goods, and many multi-minded buyers. The seller chooses posted prices for its many items, and the buyers purchase bundles to maximize their utility. For this…

It is well-known that selling different goods in a single bundle can significantly increase revenue. However, bundling is no longer profitable if the goods have high production costs. To overcome this challenge, we introduce a new…

The role of a market maker is to simultaneously offer to buy and sell quantities of goods, often a financial asset such as a share, at specified prices. An automated market maker (AMM) is a mechanism that offers to trade according to some…

I study the design of auctions in which the auctioneer is assumed to have information only about the marginal distribution of a generic bidder's valuation, but does not know the correlation structure of the joint distribution of bidders'…

A retailer is purchasing goods in bundles from suppliers and then selling these goods in bundles to customers; her goal is to maximize profit, which is the revenue obtained from selling goods minus the cost of purchasing those goods. In…

This paper studies a setting in which multiple suppliers compete for a buyer's procurement business. The buyer faces uncertain demand and there is a requirement to reserve capacity in advance of knowing the demand. Each supplier has costs…

Finding the optimal (revenue-maximizing) mechanism to sell multiple items has been a prominent and notoriously difficult open problem. Existing work has mainly focused on deriving analytical results tailored to a particular class of…

We study how to optimally segment monopolistic markets with a redistributive objective. We characterize optimal redistributive segmentations and show that they (i) induce the seller to price progressively, i.e., charge richer consumers…

We study the efficiency of allocations in large markets with a network structure where every seller owns an edge in a graph and every buyer desires a path connecting some nodes. While it is known that stable allocations in such settings can…