Related papers: Procurement without Priors: A Simple Mechanism and…

Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…

We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…

We consider a mechanism design problem for energy procurement, when there is one buyer and one seller, and the buyer is the mechanism designer. The seller can generate energy from conventional (deterministic) and renewable (random) plants,…

We study the design of efficient mechanisms under asymmetric awareness and information. Unawareness refers to the lack of conception rather than the lack of information. Assuming quasi-linear utilities and private values, we show that we…

We consider the problem of allocating heterogeneous and indivisible goods among strategic agents, with preferences over subsets of goods, when there is no medium of exchange. This model captures the well studied problem of fair allocation…

We consider a nonlinear pricing environment with private information. We provide profit guarantees (and associated mechanisms) that the seller can achieve across all possible distributions of willingness to pay of the buyers. With a…

We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…

We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…

Before purchase, a buyer of an experience good learns about the product's fit using various information sources, including some of which the seller may be unaware of. The buyer, however, can conclusively learn the fit only after purchasing…

We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…

We study robust mechanisms to sell a common-value good. We assume that the mechanism designer knows the prior distribution of the buyers' common value but is unsure of the buyers' information structure about the common value. We use linear…

We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…

This paper studies how to aggregate prosumers (or large consumers) and their collective decisions in electricity markets, with a focus on fairness. Fairness is essential for prosumers to participate in aggregation schemes. Some prosumers…

Auctions via social network, pioneered by Li et al. (2017), have been attracting considerable attention in the literature of mechanism design for auctions. However, no known mechanism has satisfied strategy-proofness, non-deficit,…

We study the problem of a budget limited buyer who wants to buy a set of items, each from a different seller, to maximize her value. The budget feasible mechanism design problem aims to design a mechanism which incentivizes the sellers to…

The advent of intelligent agents who produce and consume energy by themselves has led the smart grid into the era of "prosumer", offering the energy system and customers a unique opportunity to revaluate/trade their spot energy via a…

We consider a market where a seller sells multiple units of a commodity in a social network. Each node/buyer in the social network can only directly communicate with her neighbours, i.e. the seller can only sell the commodity to her…

We investigate the problem of a principal looking to contract an expert to provide a probability forecast for a categorical event. We assume all experts have a common public prior on the event's probability, but can form more accurate…

We consider a fixed-price mechanism design setting where a seller sells one item via a social network, but the seller can only directly communicate with her neighbours initially. Each other node in the network is a potential buyer with a…

This paper tackles challenges in pricing and revenue projections due to consumer uncertainty. We propose a novel data-based approach for firms facing unknown consumer type distributions. Unlike existing methods, we assume firms only observe…