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Sellers often prescreen potential bidders, restricting participation to a select group of capable participants. Recent advances in machine learning and generative AI make this strategy increasingly viable by enabling the cost-effective…
This paper studies the incentives of the seller and buyers to shill bid in a single-item auction. An auction is seller identity-compatible if the seller cannot profit from pretending to be one or more bidders via fake identities. It is…
In many auctions, bidders may be reluctant to reveal private information to the auctioneer and other bidders. Among deterministic bilateral communication protocols, reducing what bidders learn requires increasing what the auctioneer learns.…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
We study the revenue comparison problem of auctions when the seller has a maxmin expected utility preference. The seller holds a set of priors around some reference belief, interpreted as an approximating model of the true probability law…
We study multi-unit auctions in which bidders have limited knowledge of opponent strategies and values. We characterize optimal prior-free bids; these bids minimize the maximal loss in expected utility resulting from uncertainty surrounding…
We study how a budget-constrained bidder should learn to adaptively bid in repeated first-price auctions to maximize her cumulative payoff. This problem arose due to an industry-wide shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions…
We study the optimal behavior of a bidder in a real-time auction subject to the requirement that a specified collections of heterogeneous items be acquired within given time constraints. The problem facing this bidder is cast as a…
For selling a single item to agents with independent but non-identically distributed values, the revenue optimal auction is complex. With respect to it, Hartline and Roughgarden (2009) showed that the approximation factor of the…
The first-price auction is popular in practice for its simplicity and transparency. Moreover, its potential virtues grow in complex settings where incentive compatible auctions may generate little or no revenue. Unfortunately, the…
We study the problem of regret minimization for a single bidder in a sequence of first-price auctions where the bidder discovers the item's value only if the auction is won. Our main contribution is a complete characterization, up to…
In this paper, we study sequential auctions with two budget constrained bidders and any number of identical items. All prior results on such auctions consider only two items. We construct a canonical outcome of the auction that is the only…
A standard result from auction theory is that bidding truthfully in a second price auction is a weakly dominant strategy. The result, however, does not apply in the presence of Cost Per Action (CPA) constraints. Such constraints exist, for…
We study reserve prices in auctions with independent private values when bidders are expectations-based loss averse. We find that the optimal public reserve price excludes fewer bidder types than under risk neutrality. Moreover, we show…
This note pursues two primary objectives. First, we analyze the outcomes of an all-pay auction within a store where buyers with and without financial constraints arrive at varying rates, and where buyer types are private information.…
Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…
Second-price auctions with deposits are frequently used in blockchain environments. An auction takes place on-chain: bidders deposit an amount that fully covers their bid (but possibly exceeds it) in a smart contract. The deposit is used as…
First-price auctions are one of the most popular mechanisms for selling goods and services, with applications ranging from display advertising to timber sales. Unlike their close cousin, the second-price auction, first-price auctions do not…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
We present a quantum auction protocol using superpositions to represent bids and distributed search to identify the winner(s). Measuring the final quantum state gives the auction outcome while simultaneously destroying the superposition.…