Related papers: Deterministic Refund Mechanisms
We show that the Revenue-Optimal Deterministic Mechanism Design problem for a single additive buyer is #P-hard, even when the distributions have support size 2 for each item and, more importantly, even when the optimal solution is…
Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application…
Assortment optimization concerns the problem of selling items with fixed prices to a buyer who will purchase at most one. Typically, retailers select a subset of items, corresponding to an "assortment" of brands to carry, and make each…
We study the mechanism design problem of allocating a set of indivisible items without monetary transfers. Despite the vast literature on this very standard model, it still remains unclear how do truthful mechanisms look like. We focus on…
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 a robust selling problem where a seller attempts to sell one item to a buyer but is uncertain about the buyer's valuation distribution. Existing literature shows that robust screening provides a stronger theoretical guarantee than…
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…
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…
We study a multi-round welfare-maximising mechanism design problem in instances where agents do not know their values. On each round, a mechanism first assigns an allocation each to a set of agents and charges them a price; at the end of…
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,…
In contextual dynamic pricing, a seller sequentially prices goods based on contextual information. Buyers will purchase products only if the prices are below their valuations. The goal of the seller is to design a pricing strategy that…
We present a recommender system based on the Random Utility Model. Online shoppers are modeled as rational decision makers with limited information, and the recommendation task is formulated as the problem of optimally enriching the…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
Motivated by online settings where users can provide explicit feedback about the relevance of products that are sequentially presented to them, we look at the recommendation process as a problem of dynamically optimizing this relevance…
Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…
Dynamic mechanism design is a challenging extension to ordinary mechanism design in which the mechanism designer must make a sequence of decisions over time in the face of possibly untruthful reports of participating agents. Optimizing…
Selling reserved instances (or virtual machines) is a basic service in cloud computing. In this paper, we consider a more flexible pricing model for instance reservation, in which a customer can propose the time length and number of…
In budget-feasible mechanism design, a buyer wishes to procure a set of items of maximum value from self-interested players. We have a valuation function $v:2^U \to \mathbb{R}_+$, where $U$ is the set of all items, where $v(S)$ specifies…