Related papers: A Tale of Two Monopolies

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 study economies where consumers interact independently with many monopolists. When consumer valuations over goods are correlated, correlation can distort the induced distribution of consumer surplus (information rents). We identify which…

We study the revenue maximization problem with an imprecisely estimated distribution of a single buyer or several independent and identically distributed buyers given that this estimation is not far away from the true distribution. We use…

We study how to maximize the broker's (expected) profit in a two-sided market, where she buys items from a set of sellers and resells them to a set of buyers. Each seller has a single item to sell and holds a private value on her item, and…

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…

We study in this paper optimal mass transport over a strongly connected, directed graph on a given discrete time interval. Differently from previous literature, we do not assume full knowledge of the initial and final goods distribution…

There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by…

A seminal result of Bulow and Klemperer [1989] demonstrates the power of competition for extracting revenue: when selling a single item to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn i.i.d. from a regular distribution, the simple welfare-maximizing…

We obtain revenue guarantees for the simple pricing mechanism of a single posted price, in terms of a natural parameter of the distribution of buyers' valuations. Our revenue guarantee applies to the single item n buyers setting, with…

We study deterministic monopoly pricing under partial knowledge of the market, where the seller has access only to summary statistics of the valuation distribution, such as the mean, dispersion, and maximum value. Using tools from…

We consider the problem of finding consistent upper price bounds and super replication strategies for exotic options, given the observation of call prices in the market. This field of research is called model-independent finance and has…

We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…

We establish a rigorous duality theory, under No Unbounded Profit with Bounded Risk, for an infinite horizon problem of optimal consumption in the presence of an income stream that can terminate randomly at an exponentially distributed…

We consider the problem of maximizing revenue when selling 2 items to a single buyer with known valuation distributions. Hart and Nisan showed that selling each item separately using the optimal Myerson's price, gains at least half of the…

The existing literature on optimal auctions focuses on optimizing the expected revenue of the seller, and is appropriate for risk-neutral sellers. In this paper, we identify good mechanisms for risk-averse sellers. As is standard in the…

The assortment problem in revenue management is the problem of deciding which subset of products to offer to consumers in order to maximise revenue. A simple and natural strategy is to select the best assortment out of all those that are…

We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…

In a seminal paper, McAfee (1992) presented a truthful mechanism for double auctions, attaining asymptotically-optimal gain-from-trade without any prior information on the valuations of the traders. McAfee's mechanism handles…

Adverse selection is a version of the principal-agent problem that includes monopolist nonlinear pricing, where a monopolist with known costs seeks a profit-maximizing price menu facing a population of potential consumers whose preferences…

We consider a network of sellers, each selling a single product, where the graph structure represents pair-wise complementarities between products. We study how the network structure affects revenue and social welfare of equilibria of the…