Related papers: A Tale of Two Monopolies
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
We characterize optimal policy in a multidimensional nonlinear taxation model with bunching. We develop an empirically relevant model with cognitive and manual skills, firm heterogeneity, and labor market sorting. We first derive two…
We study the bilateral trade problem: one seller, one buyer and a single, indivisible item for sale. It is well known that there is no fully-efficient and incentive compatible mechanism for this problem that maintains a balanced budget. We…
We study undominated mechanisms with transfers for regulating a monopolist who privately observes the marginal cost of production. We show that in any undominated mechanism, there is a quantity floor, which depends only on the primitives,…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
We consider the problem of maximizing revenue when selling k items to a single buyer with known valuation distributions. We show that for a single, additive buyer whose valuations for for the items are distributed according to i.i.d.…
We advance a recently flourishing line of work at the intersection of learning theory and computational economics by studying the learnability of two classes of mechanisms prominent in economics, namely menus of lotteries and two-part…
We study a repeated trading problem in which a mechanism designer facilitates trade between a single seller and multiple buyers. Our model generalizes the classic bilateral trade setting to a multi-buyer environment. Specifically, the…
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 study a classical Bayesian mechanism design problem where a seller is selling multiple items to multiple buyers. We consider the case where the seller has costs to produce the items, and these costs are private information to the seller.…
We study the optimal pricing strategy of a monopolist selling homogeneous goods to customers over multiple periods. The customers choose their time of purchase to maximize their payoff that depends on their valuation of the product, the…
We consider the problem of welfare maximization in two-sided markets using simple mechanisms that are prior-independent. The Myerson-Satterthwaite impossibility theorem shows that even for bilateral trade, there is no feasible (IR,…
In this paper we consider multidimensional mechanism design problem for selling discrete substitutable items to a group of buyers. Previous work on this problem mostly focus on stochastic description of valuations used by the seller.…
We study the problem of finding the optimal assortment that maximizes expected revenue under the decision forest model, a recently proposed nonparametric choice model that is capable of representing any discrete choice model and in…
With spectrum auctions as our prime motivation, in this paper we analyze combinatorial auctions where agents' valuations exhibit complementarities. Assuming that the agents only value bundles of size at most $k$ and also assuming that we…
Demand forecasting plays an important role in many inventory control problems. To mitigate the potential harms of model misspecification, various forms of distributionally robust optimization have been applied. Although many of these…
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…
The buying and selling of information is taking place at a scale unprecedented in the history of commerce, thanks to the formation of online marketplaces for user data. Data providing agencies sell user information to advertisers to allow…
We consider a monopoly information holder selling information to a budget-constrained decision maker, who may benefit from the seller's information. The decision maker has a utility function that depends on his action and an uncertain state…
We study offline dynamic pricing when historical data provide incomplete coverage of the price space such that some candidate prices, including the optimal one, may be entirely unobserved. This setting is common in practice and is…