Related papers: Robust procurement design
To solve a real-world problem, the modeler usually needs to make a trade-off between model complexity and usefulness. This is also true for robust optimization, where a wide range of models for uncertainty, so-called uncertainty sets, have…
This paper studies a setting in which multiple suppliers compete for a buyer's procurement business. The buyer faces uncertain demand and there is a requirement to reserve capacity in advance of knowing the demand. Each supplier has costs…
We study the design of resilient and reliable communication networks in which a signal can be transferred only up to a limited distance before its quality falls below an acceptable threshold. When excessive signal degradation occurs,…
The problem of reward design examines the interaction between a leader and a follower, where the leader aims to shape the follower's behavior to maximize the leader's payoff by modifying the follower's reward function. Current approaches to…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…
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…
The problem of allocating scarce items to individuals is an important practical question in market design. An increasingly popular set of mechanisms for this task uses the concept of market equilibrium: individuals report their preferences,…
A seller offers a buyer a schedule of transfers and associated product qualities. After observing this schedule, the buyer chooses a flexible costly signal about his type. We show it is without loss to focus on a class of mechanisms that…
We study the robust regulation of contracts in moral hazard problems. A firm offers a contract to incentivise a worker protected by limited liability. A regulator restricts the set of permissible contracts to (i) improve efficiency and (ii)…
We consider a combined problem of teaming and scheduling of multi-skilled employees that have to perform jobs with uncertain qualification requirements. We propose two modeling approaches that generate solutions that are robust to possible…
Robust control is a core approach for controlling systems with performance guarantees that are robust to modeling error, and is widely used in real-world systems. However, current robust control approaches can only handle small system…
This paper is concerned with personalized pricing models aimed at maximizing the expected revenues or profits for a single item. While it is essential for personalized pricing to predict the purchase probabilities for each consumer, these…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…
While $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ methods can introduce robustness against worst-case perturbations, their nominal performance under conventional stochastic disturbances is often drastically reduced. Though this fundamental tradeoff between…
How should a buyer design procurement mechanisms when suppliers' costs are unknown, and the buyer does not have a prior belief? We demonstrate that simple mechanisms - that share a constant fraction of the buyer utility with the seller -…
We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…
We study a novel class of mechanism design problems in which the outcomes are constrained by the payments. This basic class of mechanism design problems captures many common economic situations, and yet it has not been studied, to our…
We analyze how uncertain technologies should be robustly regulated and how regulation should evolve with new information. An adaptive sandbox comprising a zero marginal tax up to an evolving quantity limit is (i) robust: it delivers optimal…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…