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We study a class of manipulations in combinatorial auctions where bidders fundamentally misrepresent what goods they are interested in. Prior work has largely assumed that bidders only submit bids on their bundles of interest, which we call…
We analyze the optimal information design in a click-through auction with fixed valuations per click, but stochastic click-through rates. While the auctioneer takes as given the auction rule of the click-through auction, namely the…
While auction theory views bids and valuations as continuous variables, real-world auctions are necessarily discrete. In this paper, we use a combination of analytical and computational methods to investigate whether incorporating…
Automated bidding, an emerging intelligent decision making paradigm powered by machine learning, has become popular in online advertising. Advertisers in automated bidding evaluate the cumulative utilities and have private financial…
In non-truthful auctions such as first-price and all-pay auctions, the independent strategic behaviors of bidders, with the corresponding Bayes-Nash equilibrium notion, are notoriously difficult to characterize and can cause undesirable…
We consider a revenue optimizing seller selling a single item to a buyer, on whose private value the seller has a noisy signal. We show that, when the signal is kept private, arbitrarily more revenue could potentially be extracted than if…
Auctions have been proposed as a way to provide economic incentives for primary users to dynamically allocate unused spectrum to other users in need of it. Previously proposed schemes do not take into account the fact that the power…
Budget constraints are ubiquitous in online advertisement auctions. To manage these constraints and smooth out the expenditure across auctions, the bidders (or the platform on behalf of them) often employ pacing: each bidder is assigned a…
We study the optimal placement of advertisements for interactive platforms like conversational AI assistants. Importantly, conversations add a feature absent in canonical search markets -- time. The evolution of a conversation is…
Contemporary real-world online ad auctions differ from canonical models [Edelman et al., 2007; Varian, 2009] in at least four ways: (1) values and click-through rates can depend upon users' search queries, but advertisers can only partially…
We study auction design when a seller relies on machine-learning predictions of bidders' valuations that may be unreliable. Motivated by modern ML systems that are often accurate but occasionally fail in a way that is essentially…
I consider a mechanism design problem of selling multiple goods to multiple bidders when the designer has minimal amount of information. I assume that the designer only knows the upper bounds of bidders' values for each good and has no…
Repeated multi-unit auctions, where a seller allocates multiple identical items over many rounds, are common mechanisms in electricity markets and treasury auctions. We compare the two predominant formats: uniform-price and discriminatory…
A central problem in Microeconomics is to design auctions with good revenue properties. In this setting, the bidders' valuations for the items are private knowledge, but they are drawn from publicly known prior distributions. The goal is to…
The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…
Bid leakage is a corrupt scheme in a first-price sealed-bid auction in which the procurer leaks the opponents' bids to a favoured participant. The rational behaviour of such participant is to bid close to the deadline in order to receive…
Investigating potential purchases is often a substantial investment under uncertainty. Standard market designs, such as simultaneous or English auctions, compound this with uncertainty about the price a bidder will have to pay in order to…
In an open-bid auction, a bidder can know the budgets of other bidders. Thus, a sealed-bid auction that hides bidding prices is desirable. However, in previous sealed-bid auction protocols, it has been difficult to provide a ``fund…
High-stakes auctions are often preceded by nonbinding communication between bidders and the seller. Motivated by these practices, this paper examines a two-period model in which two bidders send private cheap talk messages to the seller…
The transition to First-Price Auctions (FPA) in digital advertising has spurred significant research, yet existing work typically assumes access to a valuation oracle, ignoring the reality that values must be inferred from censored data.…