Related papers: Anonymous Pricing in Large Markets
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
Classical optimal auction theory assumes that bids reach the seller directly. We study how this picture changes when a revenue-maximizing intermediary controls access to the seller's auction. Motivated by blockchain auctions, online…
A single unit of a good is sold to one of two bidders. Each bidder has either a high prior valuation or a low prior valuation for the good. Their prior valuations are independently and identically distributed. Each bidder may observe an…
We study the following fundamental data-driven pricing problem. How can/should a decision-maker price its product based on data at a single historical price? How valuable is such data? We consider a decision-maker who optimizes over…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
We study $k$-price auctions in a complete information environment and characterize all pure-strategy Nash equilibrium outcomes. In a setting with $n$ agents having ordered valuations, we show that any agent, except those with the lowest…
We consider the problem of maximizing revenue when selling 2 items to a single buyer with known valuation distributions. Hart and Nisan showed that selling each item separately using the optimal Myerson's price, gains at least half of the…
Increasing use of computers and networks in business, government, recreation, and almost all aspects of daily life has led to a proliferation of online sensitive data about individuals and organizations. Consequently, concern about the…
Maximizing the revenue from selling two or more goods has been shown to require the use of $nonmonotonic$ mechanisms, where a higher-valuation buyer may pay less than a lower-valuation one. Here we show that the restriction to $monotonic$…
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…
In various markets where sellers compete in price, price oscillations are observed rather than convergence to equilibrium. Such fluctuations have been empirically observed in the retail market for gasoline, in airline pricing and in the…
Motivated by online retail, we consider the problem of selling one item (e.g., an ad slot) to two non-excludable buyers (say, a merchant and a brand). This problem captures, for example, situations where a merchant and a brand cooperatively…
We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic, infinite…
Very recently, we are witnessing the emergence of a number of start-ups that enables individuals to sell their private data directly to brokers and businesses. While this new paradigm may shift the balance of power between individuals and…
We study the price of anarchy of the first-price auction in the autobidding world, where bidders can be either utility maximizers (i.e., traditional bidders) or value maximizers (i.e., autobidders). We show that with autobidders only, the…
Recently, there is growing interest and need for dynamic pricing algorithms, especially, in the field of online marketplaces by offering smart pricing options for big online stores. We present an approach to adjust prices based on the…
We consider the problem of implementing an individually rational, asymptotically Pareto optimal allocation in a barter-exchange economy where agents are endowed with goods and have preferences over the goods of others, but may not use money…
We study auctions that are robust at any scale, i.e., they can be applied to sell both expensive and cheap items and achieve the best multiplicative approximations of the optimal revenue in the worst case. We show that the optimal mechanism…
In this paper, we study $k$-unit single sample prophet inequalities. A seller has $k$ identical, indivisible items to sell. A sequence of buyers arrive one-by-one, with each buyer's private value for the item, $X_i$, revealed to the seller…
A seller with one unit of a good faces N\geq3 buyers and a single competitor who sells one other identical unit in a second-price auction with a reserve price. Buyers who do not get the seller's good will compete in the competitor's…