Related papers: Deterministic Refund Mechanisms
We consider the problem of a firm seeking to use personalized pricing to sell an exogenously given stock of a product over a finite selling horizon to different consumer types. We assume that the type of an arriving consumer can be observed…
We revisit the well-studied problem of budget-feasible procurement, where a buyer with a strict budget constraint seeks to acquire services from a group of strategic providers (the sellers). During the last decade, several strategyproof…
Auctions with partially-revealed information about items are broadly employed in real-world applications, but the underlying mechanisms have limited theoretical support. In this work, we study a machine learning formulation of these types…
Our work revisits the design of mechanisms via the learning-augmented framework. In this model, the algorithm is enhanced with imperfect (machine-learned) information concerning the input, usually referred to as prediction. The goal is to…
We study multi-item profit maximization when there is an underlying distribution over buyers' values. In practice, a full description of the distribution is typically unavailable, so we study the setting where the mechanism designer only…
We study the problem of dynamic assortment personalization with large, heterogeneous populations and wide arrays of products, and demonstrate the importance of structural priors for effective, efficient large-scale personalization.…
In this paper, we show a tight approximation guarantee for budget-feasible mechanisms with an additive buyer. We propose a new simple randomized mechanism with approximation ratio of $2$, improving the previous best known result of $3$. Our…
We study the problem of social welfare maximization in bilateral trade, where two agents, a buyer and a seller, trade an indivisible item. We consider arguably the simplest form of mechanisms -- the fixed-price mechanisms, where the…
We consider a setting where $n$ buyers, with combinatorial preferences over $m$ items, and a seller, running a priority-based allocation mechanism, repeatedly interact. Our goal, from observing limited information about the results of these…
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…
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…
We study the problem of a seller dynamically pricing $d$ distinct types of indivisible goods, when faced with the online arrival of unit-demand buyers drawn independently from an unknown distribution. The goods are not in limited supply,…
In online marketplaces, customers have access to hundreds of reviews for a single product. Buyers often use reviews from other customers that share their type -- such as height for clothing, skin type for skincare products, and location for…
We introduce a novel theoretical framework for Return On Investment (ROI) maximization in repeated decision-making. Our setting is motivated by the use case of companies that regularly receive proposals for technological innovations and…
This paper studies a search problem where a consumer is initially aware of only a few products. At every point in time, the consumer then decides between searching among alternatives he is already aware of and discovering more products. I…
It is widely believed that computing payments needed to induce truthful bidding is somehow harder than simply computing the allocation. We show that the opposite is true: creating a randomized truthful mechanism is essentially as easy as a…
Designing revenue optimal auctions for selling an item to $n$ symmetric bidders is a fundamental problem in mechanism design. Myerson (1981) shows that the second price auction with an appropriate reserve price is optimal when bidders'…
In many shopping scenarios, e.g., in online shopping, customers have a large menu of options to choose from. However, most of the buyers do not browse all the options and make decision after considering only a small part of the menu. To…
This paper develops the theory of mechanism redesign by which an auctioneer can reoptimize an auction based on bid data collected from previous iterations of the auction on bidders from the same market. We give a direct method for…
We study a mechanism-design problem in which spiteful agents strive to not only maximize their rewards but also, contingent upon their own payoff levels, seek to lower the opponents' rewards. We characterize all individually rational (IR)…