Related papers: Procurement without Priors: A Simple Mechanism and…
I consider a mechanism design problem of selling multiple goods to multiple bidders when the designer has minimal amount of information. I assume that the designer only knows the upper bounds of bidders' values for each good and has no…
A central problem in Microeconomics is to design auctions with good revenue properties. In this setting, the bidders' valuations for the items are private knowledge, but they are drawn from publicly known prior distributions. The goal is to…
An auction house cannot generally provide the optimal auction technology to every client. Instead it provides one or several auction technologies, and clients select the most appropriate one. For example, eBay provides ascending auctions…
We present different versions of a conjecture which would express that first price mechanisms never work very badly in a very general class of problems. The definitions include most of the problems where there is a principal (seller) who…
A multi-product monopolist faces a buyer who is privately informed about his valuations for the goods. As is well-known, optimal mechanisms are in general complicated, while simple mechanisms -- such as pure bundling or separate sales --…
Budget-feasible procurement has been a major paradigm in mechanism design since its introduction by Singer (2010). An auctioneer (buyer) with a strict budget constraint is interested in buying goods or services from a group of strategic…
This paper studies the optimal refund mechanism when an uninformed buyer can privately acquire information about his valuation of a product over time. We consider a class of refund mechanisms based on stochastic return policies: if the…
We consider a task of scheduling with a common deadline on a single machine. Every player reports to a scheduler the length of his job and the scheduler needs to finish as many jobs as possible by the deadline. For this simple problem,…
We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…
A rich class of mechanism design problems can be understood as incomplete-information games between a principal who commits to a policy and an agent who responds, with payoffs determined by an unknown state of the world. Traditionally,…
We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…
A principal with cheap capital optimally forces her counterparty to borrow at above-market rates. The reason: the form of finance is a screening device. Advances provide liquidity but pool types; contingent transfers separate types, but,…
We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution $D$ in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational…
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…
In a recent publication, using a simple two-period model, which is already capable to capture essential non-convex multiperiod bids, Richstein et al. have shown that in the case of optimal bidding, multi-part bidding always ensures a higher…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
We propose a new efficient online algorithm to learn the parameters governing the purchasing behavior of a utility maximizing buyer, who responds to prices, in a repeated interaction setting. The key feature of our algorithm is that it can…
We study the efficiency of allocations in large markets with a network structure where every seller owns an edge in a graph and every buyer desires a path connecting some nodes. While it is known that stable allocations in such settings can…
We study a single-buyer pricing problem with unreliable side information, motivated by the increasing use of AI-assisted decision-making and LLM-based predictions. The seller observes a private sample that may be either accurate (coinciding…
We study the design of mechanisms under asymmetric awareness and information. While the mechanism designer cannot necessarily commit to a particular social choice function in the face of unawareness, she can at least commit to properties of…