Related papers: Evaluating the Performance of Approximation Mechan…
In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian revenue-maximizing mechanism design model where the items have fixed, exogenously-given prices. Buyers are unit-demand and have an ordinal ranking over purchasing either one of these items at its given…
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…
This paper settles the sample complexity of single-parameter revenue maximization by showing matching upper and lower bounds, up to a poly-logarithmic factor, for all families of value distributions that have been considered in the…
Consider Myerson's optimal auction with respect to an inaccurate prior, e.g., estimated from data, which is an underestimation of the true value distribution. Can the auctioneer expect getting at least the optimal revenue w.r.t. the…
In this paper, we consider the problem of designing incentive compatible auctions for multiple (homogeneous) units of a good, when bidders have private valuations and private budget constraints. When only the valuations are private and the…
We apply marginal analysis \`a la Bulow and Roberts (1989) to characterize revenue-maximizing selling mechanisms for a multiproduct monopoly. We derive marginal revenue from price perturbations over arbitrary sets of bundles and show that…
We study individual rational, Pareto optimal, and incentive compatible mechanisms for auctions with heterogeneous items and budget limits. For multi-dimensional valuations we show that there can be no deterministic mechanism with these…
We study revenue-optimal pricing in data markets with rational, budget-constrained buyers. Such a market offers multiple datasets for sale, and buyers aim to improve the accuracy of their prediction tasks by acquiring data bundles. The…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
In the multi-unit pricing problem, multiple units of a single item are for sale. A buyer's valuation for $n$ units of the item is $v \min \{ n, d\} $, where the per unit valuation $v$ and the capacity $d$ are private information of the…
In this research, we study the problem that a collector acquires items from the owner based on the item qualities the owner declares and an independent appraiser's assessments. The owner is interested in maximizing the probability that the…
This paper considers Bayesian revenue maximization in the $k$-unit setting, where a monopolist seller has $k$ copies of an indivisible item and faces $n$ unit-demand buyers (whose value distributions can be non-identical). Four basic…
We provide a characterization of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanisms in settings where a monopolist sells k items over k periods to a buyer who realizes his value for item i in the beginning of period i. We require that the mechanism…
Using duality theory techniques we derive simple, closed-form formulas for bounding the optimal revenue of a monopolist selling many heterogeneous goods, in the case where the buyer's valuations for the items come i.i.d. from a uniform…
The transition to auto-bidding in online advertising has shifted the focus of auction theory from quasi-linear utility maximization to value maximization subject to financial constraints. We study mechanism design for buyers with private…
We study a participatory budgeting problem, where a set of strategic agents wish to split a divisible budget among different projects, by aggregating their proposals on a single division. Unfortunately, the straight-forward rule that…
The problem of scheduling unrelated machines has been studied since the inception of algorithmic mechanism design \cite{NR99}. It is a resource allocation problem that entails assigning $m$ tasks to $n$ machines for execution. Machines are…
Myerson derived a simple and elegant solution to the single-parameter revenue-maximization problem in his seminal work on optimal auction design assuming the usual model of quasi-linear utilities. In this paper, we consider a slight…
We study efficiency and budget balance for designing mechanisms in general quasi-linear domains. Green and Laffont (1979) proved that one cannot generically achieve both. We consider strategyproof budget-balanced mechanisms that are…
We study the problem of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms for a selfish mediator who facilitates trade between a buyer and a seller. We consider a setting where the mediator does not have information advantage and the buyer's…