Related papers: Competition Complexity in Multi-Item Auctions: Bey…
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'…
We initiate the study of the social welfare loss caused by corrupt auctioneers, both in single-item and multi-unit auctions. In our model, the auctioneer may collude with the winning bidders by letting them lower their bids in exchange for…
We consider a principal seller with $m$ heterogeneous products to sell to an additive buyer over independent items. The principal can offer an arbitrary menu of product bundles, but faces competition from smaller and more agile single-item…
We introduce the notion of rigidity in auction design and use it to analyze some fundamental aspects of mechanism design. We focus on single-item auctions where the values of the bidders are drawn from some (possibly correlated)…
Motivated by recent progress on pricing in the AI literature, we study marketplaces that contain multiple vendors offering identical or similar products and unit-demand buyers with different valuations on these vendors. The objective of…
Along with substantial progress made recently in designing near-optimal mechanisms for multi-item auctions, interesting structural questions have also been raised and studied. In particular, is it true that the seller can always extract…
Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
Since economic mechanisms are often applied to very different instances of the same problem, it is desirable to identify mechanisms that work well in a wide range of circumstances. We pursue this goal for a position auction setting and…
In display advertising, a small group of sellers and bidders face each other in up to 10 12 auctions a day. In this context, revenue maximisation via monopoly price learning is a high-value problem for sellers. By nature, these auctions are…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
In the standard single-dimensional model of position auctions, bidders agree on the relative values of the positions and each of them submits a single bid that is interpreted in terms of these values. Motivated by current practice in…
We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $m$ heterogeneous items and a single buyer whose valuation $v$ for the items may exhibit both substitutes (i.e., for some $S, T$, $v(S \cup T) < v(S) + v(T)$) and complements (i.e., for some $S,…
Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bids reach the seller directly. We study how this picture changes when a revenue-maximizing intermediary controls access to the seller's auction. Motivated by blockchain auctions, online…
We improve the best known competitive ratio (from 1/4 to 1/2), for the online multi-unit allocation problem, where the objective is to maximize the single-price revenue. Moreover, the competitive ratio of our algorithm tends to 1, as the…
We study the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We study the equilibria of uniform price auctions where many asymmetric bidders have flat demands up to their respective quantity constraints. We present an iterative procedure that systematically finds an equilibrium outcome as well as an…
We study fair mechanisms for the (asymmetric) one-sided allocation problem with m items and n multi-unit demand agents with additive, unit-sum valuations. The symmetric case (m=n), the one-sided matching problem, has been studied…
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.…