Related papers: Evaluating the Performance of Approximation Mechan…
A fundamental assumption in classical mechanism design is that buyers are perfect optimizers. However, in practice, buyers may be limited by their computational capabilities or a lack of information, and may not be able to perfectly…
Maximizing the revenue from selling _more than one_ good (or item) to a single buyer is a notoriously difficult problem, in stark contrast to the one-good case. For two goods, we show that simple "one-dimensional" mechanisms, such as…
The paper designs revenue-maximizing auction mechanisms for agents who aim to maximize their total obtained values rather than the classical quasi-linear utilities. Several models have been proposed to capture the behaviors of such agents…
It was recently shown in [http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.5518] that revenue optimization can be computationally efficiently reduced to welfare optimization in all multi-dimensional Bayesian auction problems with arbitrary (possibly…
We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…
We study the revenue maximization problem with an imprecisely estimated distribution of a single buyer or several independent and identically distributed buyers given that this estimation is not far away from the true distribution. We use…
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 consider a revenue-maximizing seller with $n$ items facing a single buyer. We introduce the notion of symmetric menu complexity of a mechanism, which counts the number of distinct options the buyer may purchase, up to permutations of the…
In this paper, we present the first approximation algorithms for the problem of designing revenue optimal Bayesian incentive compatible auctions when there are multiple (heterogeneous) items and when bidders can have arbitrary demand and…
We study the pricing query complexity of revenue maximization for a single buyer whose private valuation is drawn from an unknown distribution. In this setting, the seller must learn the optimal monopoly price by posting prices and…
The assortment problem in revenue management is the problem of deciding which subset of products to offer to consumers in order to maximise revenue. A simple and natural strategy is to select the best assortment out of all those that are…
The framework of budget-feasible mechanism design studies procurement auctions where the auctioneer (buyer) aims to maximize his valuation function subject to a hard budget constraint. We study the problem of designing truthful mechanisms…
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 $monotonic$…
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…
We study the problem of selling $n$ items to a single buyer with an additive valuation function. We consider the valuation of the items to be correlated, i.e., desirabilities of the buyer for the items are not drawn independently. Ideally,…
A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…
Motivated by autobidding systems in online advertising, we study revenue maximization in markets with divisible goods and budget-constrained buyers with linear valuations. Our aim is to compute a single price for each good and an allocation…
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…
Budget feasible mechanisms, recently initiated by Singer (FOCS 2010), extend algorithmic mechanism design problems to a realistic setting with a budget constraint. We consider the problem of designing truthful budget feasible mechanisms for…
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…