Related papers: Collusion-proof Auction Design using Side Informat…
There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by…
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…
In this paper we show that payment computation essentially does not present any obstacle in designing truthful mechanisms, even for multi-parameter domains, and even when we can only call the allocation rule once. We present a general…
The generalized second price (GSP) auction has served as the core selling mechanism for sponsored search ads for over a decade. However, recent trends expanding the set of allowed ad formats---to include a variety of sizes, decorations, and…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
Online bidding serves as a fundamental information system in mobile ecosystems, facilitating real-time ad allocation across billions of devices while optimizing both platform performance and user experience through data-driven decision…
In this paper, we present the first approximation algorithms for the problem of designing revenue optimal Bayesian incentive compatible auctions when there are multiple (heterogeneous) items and when bidders can have arbitrary demand and…
The prospect of collusive agreements being stabilized via the use of pricing algorithms is widely discussed by antitrust experts and economists. However, the literature is often lacking the perspective of computer scientists, and seems to…
We explore the approximation power of deterministic obviously strategy-proof mechanisms in auctions, where the objective is welfare maximization. A trivial ascending auction on the grand bundle guarantees an approximation of $\min\{m,n\}$…
In this paper, we study efficiency in truthful auctions via a social network, where a seller can only spread the information of an auction to the buyers through the buyers' network. In single-item auctions, we show that no mechanism is…
We study mechanism design when agents may have hidden secondary goals which will manifest as non-trivial preferences among outcomes for which their primary utility is the same. We show that in such cases, a mechanism is robust against…
Recent scholarly work has extensively examined the phenomenon of algorithmic collusion driven by AI-enabled pricing algorithms. However, online platforms commonly deploy recommender systems that influence how consumers discover and purchase…
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 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…
We show that every universally truthful randomized mechanism for combinatorial auctions with submodular valuations that provides $m^{\frac 1 2 -\epsilon}$ approximation to the social welfare and uses value queries only must use…
We provide the first analysis of (deferred acceptance) clock auctions in the learning-augmented framework. These auctions satisfy a unique list of appealing properties, including obvious strategyproofness, transparency, and unconditional…
Recent empirical work demonstrates that online advertisement can exhibit bias in the delivery of ads across users even when all advertisers bid in a non-discriminatory manner. We study the design of ad auctions that, given fair bids, are…
Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…
Collusion in market pricing is a concept associated with human actions to raise market prices through artificially limited supply. Recently, the idea of algorithmic collusion was put forward, where the human action in the pricing process is…
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…