Related papers: Ex-Ante Truthful Distribution-Reporting Mechanisms
A common practice in many auctions is to offer bidders an opportunity to improve their bids, known as a Best and Final Offer (BAFO) stage. This final bid can depend on new information provided about either the asset or the competitors. This…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
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…
The design of revenue-maximizing auctions with strong incentive guarantees is a core concern of economic theory. Computational auctions enable online advertising, sourcing, spectrum allocation, and myriad financial markets. Analytic…
We study the problem of learning revenue-optimal multi-bidder auctions from samples when the samples of bidders' valuations can be adversarially corrupted or drawn from distributions that are adversarially perturbed. First, we prove tight…
Consider Myerson's optimal auction with respect to an inaccurate prior, e.g., estimated from data, which is an underestimation of the true value distribution. Can the auctioneer expect getting at least the optimal revenue w.r.t. the…
We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a selfish mediator who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. We consider a setting where the mediator does not have information advantage and the buyer's…
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 study the problem of selling a good to a group of bidders with interdependent values in a prior-free setting. Each bidder has a signal that can take one of $k$ different values, and her value for the good is a weakly increasing function…
We study a data marketplace where a broker intermediates between buyers, who seek to estimate the mean \(\mu\) of an unknown normal distribution \(\Ncal(\mu, \sigma^2)\), and contributors, who can collect data from this distribution at a…
We consider an optimal stopping problem with n correlated offers where the goal is to design a (randomized) stopping strategy that maximizes the expected value of the offer in the sequence at which we stop. Instead of assuming to know the…
In this research, we study the problem that a collector acquires items from the owner based on the item qualities the owner declares and an independent appraiser's assessments. The owner is interested in maximizing the probability that the…
Generating good revenue is one of the most important problems in Bayesian auction design, and many (approximately) optimal dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) Bayesian mechanisms have been constructed for various auction settings.…
We study optimal auction design in an independent private values environment where bidders can endogenously -- but at a cost -- improve information about their own valuations. The optimal mechanism is two-stage: at stage-1 bidders register…
The notion of \emph{envy-freeness} is a natural and intuitive fairness requirement in resource allocation. With indivisible goods, such fair allocations are unfortunately not guaranteed to exist. Classical works have avoided this issue by…
Myerson's seminal work provides a computationally efficient revenue-optimal auction for selling one item to multiple bidders. Generalizing this work to selling multiple items at once has been a central question in economics and algorithmic…
In practice, auction data are often endogenously censored and anonymous, revealing only limited outcome statistics rather than full bid profiles. We study robust auction design when the seller observes only aggregated, anonymous order…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
Multi-item revenue-optimal mechanisms are known to be extremely complex, often offering buyers randomized lotteries of goods. In the standard buy-one model, it is known that optimal mechanisms can yield revenue infinitely higher than that…
A seller is pricing identical copies of a good to a stream of unit-demand buyers. Each buyer has a value on the good as his private information. The seller only knows the empirical value distribution of the buyer population and chooses the…