Related papers: Identification in Auctions with Truncated Transact…
When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…
We study auctions with severe bounds on the communication allowed: each bidder may only transmit t bits of information to the auctioneer. We consider both welfare- and profit-maximizing auctions under this communication restriction. For…
We study information design in click-through auctions, in which the bidders/advertisers bid for winning an opportunity to show their ads but only pay for realized clicks. The payment may or may not happen, and its probability is called the…
We study equilibria in two-buyer sequential second-price (or first-price) auctions for identical goods. Buyers have weakly decreasing incremental values, and we make a behavioural no-overbidding assumption: the buyers do not bid above their…
Shilling is the use of artificial bids to make competition appear stronger and push prices upward. We study repeated first-price auctions in which shilling affects feedback but not allocation: the learner wins or loses against the real…
We study the price of anarchy of the first-price auction in the autobidding world, where bidders can be either utility maximizers (i.e., traditional bidders) or value maximizers (i.e., autobidders). We show that with autobidders only, the…
Existing auto-bidding algorithms in digital advertising often treat the value of an ad opportunity as the revenue obtained when an ad is shown and/or clicked, and bid accordingly. This can lead to wasteful spending because the true value is…
Notifications are important for the user experience in mobile apps and can influence their engagement. However, too many notifications can be disruptive for users. A typical mobile app usually has several types of notification, managed by…
The declining price anomaly states that the price weakly decreases when multiple copies of an item are sold sequentially over time. The anomaly has been observed in a plethora of practical applications. On the theoretical side, Gale and…
We provide a unifying way to analyze how risk aversion changes bidding in auctions by asking which bids become more attractive as bidders become more risk averse. In first-price auctions, under two payoff conditions--winning is never worse…
Signaling is an important topic in the study of asymmetric information in economic settings. In particular, the transparency of information available to a seller in an auction setting is a question of major interest. We introduce the study…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions with budget constraints. In each period, the decision maker needs to submit a bid to win the auction and maximize the total collected reward, subject to…
We study the problem of learning to bid when the bidder's value is dynamic, i.e., when the current value depends on past outcomes. Specifically, we consider a bidder participating in repeated second-price auctions whose value depends on the…
We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue,…
We study the problem of characterizing revenue optimal auctions for single-minded buyers. Each buyer is interested only in a specific bundle of items and has a value for the same. Both his bundle and its value are his private information.…
In a single-parameter mechanism design problem, a provider is looking to sell a service to a group of potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ has a private value $v_i$ for receiving the service and a feasibility constraint restricts which sets of…
Setting an effective reserve price for strategic bidders in repeated auctions is a central question in online advertising. In this paper, we investigate how to set an anonymous reserve price in repeated auctions based on historical bids in…
In many applications, ads are displayed together with the prices, so as to provide a direct comparison among similar products or services. The price-displaying feature not only influences the consumers' decisions, but also affects the…
We propose a new nonparametric estimator for first-price auctions with independent private values that imposes the monotonicity constraint on the estimated inverse bidding strategy. We show that our estimator has a smaller asymptotic…
We study actual bidding behavior when a new auction format gets introduced into the marketplace. More specifically, we investigate this question using a novel dataset on internet display advertising auctions that exploits a staggered…