Related papers: Ex-Ante Truthful Distribution-Reporting Mechanisms
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 design a fixed-price auction mechanism for a seller to sell multiple items in a tree-structured market. The buyers have independently drawn valuation from a uniform distribution, and the seller would like to incentivize buyers to invite…
We study the revenue performance of sequential posted price mechanisms and some natural extensions, for a general setting where the valuations of the buyers are drawn from a correlated distribution. Sequential posted price mechanisms are…
In practice, most auction mechanisms are not strategy-proof, so equilibrium analysis is required to predict bidding behavior. In many auctions, though, an exact equilibrium is not known and one would like to understand whether -- manually…
We consider the problem of purchasing data for machine learning or statistical estimation. The data analyst has a budget to purchase datasets from multiple data providers. She does not have any test data that can be used to evaluate the…
We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of $m$ goods among $n$ agents in the asymptotic setting, where each item's value for each agent is drawn from an underlying joint distribution. Prior works have shown that if this distribution…
We propose a new architecture to approximately learn incentive compatible, revenue-maximizing auctions from sampled valuations. Our architecture uses the Sinkhorn algorithm to perform a differentiable bipartite matching which allows the…
We study the classic bilateral trade setting. Myerson and Satterthwaite show that there is no Bayesian incentive compatible and budget-balanced mechanism that obtains the gains from trade of the first-best mechanism. Consider the…
Two sellers compete to sell identical products to a single buyer. Each seller chooses an arbitrary mechanism, possibly involving lotteries, to sell their product. The utility-maximizing buyer can choose to participate in one or both…
A large fraction of online advertisement is sold via repeated second price auctions. In these auctions, the reserve price is the main tool for the auctioneer to boost revenues. In this work, we investigate the following question: Can…
Peer prediction mechanisms incentivize agents to truthfully report their signals even in the absence of verification by comparing agents' reports with those of their peers. In the detail-free multi-task setting, agents respond to multiple…
We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…
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…
A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…
I study the optimal allocation of positional goods in the presence of externalities arising from consumers' concerns about relative consumption. Applications include luxury goods, priority services, education, and organizational…
Very few exact solutions are known for the monopolist's $k$-item $n$-buyer maximum revenue problem with additive valuation in which $k, n >1$ and the buyers $i$ have independent private distributions $F^j_i$ on items $j$. In this paper we…
The seminal impossibility result of Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) states that for bilateral trade, there is no mechanism that is individually rational (IR), incentive compatible (IC), weakly budget balanced, and efficient. This has led…
Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to possess…
We develop efficient algorithms to construct utility maximizing mechanisms in the presence of risk averse players (buyers and sellers) in Bayesian settings. We model risk aversion by a concave utility function, and players play…
We study allocation problems without monetary transfers where agents have correlated types, i.e., hold private information about one another. Such peer information is relevant in various settings, including science funding, allocation of…