Related papers: Procurement without Priors: A Simple Mechanism and…
We study fair mechanisms for the classic job scheduling problem on unrelated machines with the objective of minimizing the makespan. This problem is equivalent to minimizing the egalitarian social cost in the fair division of chores. The…
We design a fixed-price auction mechanism for a seller to sell multiple items in a tree-structured market. The buyers have independently drawn valuation from a uniform distribution, and the seller would like to incentivize buyers to invite…
A speculator can take advantage of a procurement auction by acquiring items for sale before the auction. The accumulated market power can then be exercised in the auction and may lead to a large enough gain to cover the acquisition costs. I…
We describe mechanisms for the allocation of a scarce resource among multiple users in a way that is efficient, fair, and strategy-proof, but when users do not know their resource requirements. The mechanism is repeated for multiple rounds…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
We study the optimal design of electricity contracts among a population of consumers with different needs. This question is tackled within the framework of Principal-Agent problems in presence of adverse selection. The particular features…
We analyze a principal-agent procurement problem in which the principal (she) is unaware some of the marginal cost types of the agent (he). Communication arises naturally as some types of the agent may have an incentive to raise the…
Recent results, establishing evidence of intractability for such restrictive utility functions as additively separable, piecewise-linear and concave, under both Fisher and Arrow-Debreu market models, have prompted the question of whether we…
In a single-parameter mechanism design problem, a provider is looking to sell a service to a group of potential buyers. Each buyer $i$ has a private value $v_i$ for receiving the service and a feasibility constraint restricts which sets of…
In fair division of indivisible goods, using sequences of sincere choices (or picking sequences) is a natural way to allocate the objects. The idea is the following: at each stage, a designated agent picks one object among those that…
We develop a novel framework for costly information acquisition in which a decision-maker learns about an unobserved state by choosing a signal distribution, with the cost of information determined by the distribution of noise in the…
We study competitive equilibria in the classic Shapley-Shubik assignment model with indivisible goods and unit-demand buyers, with budget constraints: buyers can specify a maximum price they are willing to pay for each item, beyond which…
In recent years, many new and interesting models of successful online business have been developed. Many of these are based on the competition between users, such as online auctions, where the product price is not fixed and tends to rise.…
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…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
Motivated by the recent popularity of machine learning training services, we introduce a contract design problem in which a provider sells a service that results in an outcome of uncertain quality for the buyer. The seller has a set of…
We study the classic problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among a group of agents, and focus on the notion of approximate proportionality known as PROPm. Prior work showed that there exists an allocation that satisfies…
Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…
Auctions with partially-revealed information about items are broadly employed in real-world applications, but the underlying mechanisms have limited theoretical support. In this work, we study a machine learning formulation of these types…
We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $m$ heterogeneous items and a single buyer whose valuation $v$ for the items may exhibit both substitutes (i.e., for some $S, T$, $v(S \cup T) < v(S) + v(T)$) and complements (i.e., for some $S,…