Related papers: Hallucinating Flows for Optimal Mechanisms

A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…

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 provide an elementary proof that revenue-maximizing mechanisms exist in multi-parameter settings whenever the distribution of valuations has finite expectation.

We examine information structure design, also called "persuasion" or "signaling", in the presence of a constraint on the amount of communication. We focus on the fundamental setting of bilateral trade, which in its simplest form involves a…

The existing literature on optimal auctions focuses on optimizing the expected revenue of the seller, and is appropriate for risk-neutral sellers. In this paper, we identify good mechanisms for risk-averse sellers. As is standard in the…

In the standard formulation of mechanism design, a key assumption is that the designer has reliable information and technology to determine a prior distribution on types of the agents. In the meanwhile, as pointed out by the Wilson's…

We consider a model of bilateral trade with private values. The value of the buyer and the cost of the seller are jointly distributed. The true joint distribution is unknown to the designer, however, the marginal distributions of the value…

We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…

A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…

We show that computing the revenue-optimal deterministic auction in unit-demand single-buyer Bayesian settings, i.e. the optimal item-pricing, is computationally hard even in single-item settings where the buyer's value distribution is a…

Mechanism design for one-sided markets has been investigated for several decades in economics and in computer science. More recently, there has been an increased attention on mechanisms for two-sided markets, in which buyers and sellers act…

We consider the revenue maximization problem of a monopolist via a non-Myersonian approach that could generalize to multiple items and multiple buyers. Although such an approach does not lead to any closed-form solution of the problem, it…

In practice, auction data are often endogenously censored and anonymous, revealing only limited outcome statistics rather than full bid profiles. We study robust auction design when the seller observes only aggregated, anonymous order…

We study revenue maximization in multi-item multi-bidder auctions under the natural item-independence assumption - a classical problem in Multi-Dimensional Bayesian Mechanism Design. One of the biggest challenges in this area is developing…

There is only one technique for prior-free optimal mechanism design that generalizes beyond the structurally benevolent setting of digital goods. This technique uses random sampling to estimate the distribution of agent values and then…

We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…

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 derive the revenue-optimal efficient (welfare-maximizing) mechanism in a general multidimensional mechanism design setting when type spaces -- that is, the underlying domains from which agents' values come from -- can capture arbitrarily…

We study independent private values auction environments in which the auctioneer's revenue depends nonlinearly on bidders' interim winning probabilities. Our framework accommodates heterogeneity among bidders and places no ad hoc…

We study the problem of selling information to a data-buyer who faces a decision problem under uncertainty. We consider the classic Bayesian decision-theoretic model pioneered by [Blackwell, 1951, 1953]. Initially, the data buyer has only…