Related papers: Ex-Ante Truthful Distribution-Reporting Mechanisms
A rapidly growing literature on lying in behavioral economics and psychology shows that individuals often do not lie even when lying maximizes their utility. In this work, we attempt to incorporate these findings into the theory of…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
The paper designs revenue-maximizing auction mechanisms for agents who aim to maximize their total obtained values rather than the classical quasi-linear utilities. Several models have been proposed to capture the behaviors of such agents…
We study multi-buyer multi-item sequential item pricing mechanisms for revenue maximization with the goal of approximating a natural fractional relaxation -- the ex ante optimal revenue. We assume that buyers' values are subadditive but…
Peer prediction mechanisms are often adopted to elicit truthful contributions from crowd workers when no ground-truth verification is available. Recently, mechanisms of this type have been developed to incentivize effort exertion, in…
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
We present a general framework for designing approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms for multi-item additive auctions, which applies to both truthful and non-truthful auctions. Given a (not necessarily truthful) single-item auction format…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
We consider a monopolist seller with $n$ heterogeneous items, facing a single buyer. The buyer has a value for each item drawn independently according to (non-identical) distributions, and her value for a set of items is additive. The…
We study simple and approximately optimal auctions for agents with a particular form of risk-averse preferences. We show that, for symmetric agents, the optimal revenue (given a prior distribution over the agent preferences) can be…
We study the power of price discrimination via an intermediary in bilateral trade, when there is a revenue-maximizing seller selling an item to a buyer with a private value drawn from a prior. Between the seller and the buyer, there is an…
We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution $D$ in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational…
A recent line of research has established a novel desideratum for designing approximately-revenue-optimal multi-item mechanisms, namely the buy-many constraint. Under this constraint, prices for different allocations made by the mechanism…
We study the problem of fairly and truthfully allocating $m$ indivisible items to $n$ agents with additive preferences. Specifically, we consider truthful mechanisms outputting allocations that satisfy EF$^{+u}_{-v}$, where, in an…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
The paper studies the problem of auction design in a setting where the auctioneer accesses the knowledge of the valuation distribution only through statistical samples. A new framework is established that combines the statistical decision…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
In today's online advertising markets, it is common for advertisers to set long-term budgets. Correspondingly, advertising platforms adopt budget control methods to ensure that advertisers' payments lie within their budgets. Most budget…
Myerson derived a simple and elegant solution to the single-parameter revenue-maximization problem in his seminal work on optimal auction design assuming the usual model of quasi-linear utilities. In this paper, we consider a slight…
We consider a model of bilateral trade with private values. The value of the buyer and the cost of the seller are jointly distributed. The true joint distribution is unknown to the designer, however, the marginal distributions of the value…