Related papers: Hallucinating Flows for Optimal Mechanisms
Selling a perfectly divisible item to potential buyers is a fundamental task with apparent applications to pricing communication bandwidth and cloud computing services. Surprisingly, despite the rich literature on single-item auctions,…
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.…
We design simple mechanisms to approximate the Gains from Trade (GFT) in two-sided markets with multiple unit-supply sellers and multiple unit-demand buyers. A classical impossibility result by Myerson and Satterthwaite showed that even…
We consider the Item Pricing problem for revenue maximization in the limited supply setting, where a single seller with $n$ items caters to $m$ buyers with unknown subadditive valuation functions who arrive in a sequence. The seller sets…
We provide a reduction from revenue maximization to welfare maximization in multi-dimensional Bayesian auctions with arbitrary (possibly combinatorial) feasibility constraints and independent bidders with arbitrary (possibly combinatorial)…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
The paper designs revenue-maximizing auction mechanisms for agents who aim to maximize their total obtained values rather than the classical quasi-linear utilities. Several models have been proposed to capture the behaviors of such agents…
We study the problem of selling $n$ heterogeneous items to a single buyer, whose values for different items are dependent. Under arbitrary dependence, Hart and Nisan show that no simple mechanism can achieve a non-negligible fraction of the…
Motivated by practical constraints in online advertising, we investigate single-parameter auction design for bidders with constraints on their Return On Investment (ROI) -- a targeted minimum ratio between the obtained value and the…
We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the…
In a combinatorial auction with item bidding, agents participate in multiple single-item second-price auctions at once. As some items might be substitutes, agents need to strategize in order to maximize their utilities. A number of results…
We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…
This paper studies a monopolist selling multiple goods to a consumer with one-dimensional private types. I provide a sufficient condition under which the monopolist's problem is equivalent to finding the upper envelope of the marginal…
We present prior robust algorithms for a large class of resource allocation problems where requests arrive one-by-one (online), drawn independently from an unknown distribution at every step. We design a single algorithm that, for every…
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 study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…
I study the design of auctions in which the auctioneer is assumed to have information only about the marginal distribution of a generic bidder's valuation, but does not know the correlation structure of the joint distribution of bidders'…
We study balanced exchange problems in which agents with responsive preferences are endowed with multiple indivisible objects and can trade without transfers (e.g. shift exchange, time-banking). Eliciting full preferences over bundles is…
Two sellers compete to sell identical products to a single buyer. Each seller chooses an arbitrary mechanism, possibly involving lotteries, to sell their product. The utility-maximizing buyer can choose to participate in one or both…
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…