Related papers: Evaluating the Performance of Approximation Mechan…
The optimal pricing problem is a fundamental problem that arises in combinatorial auctions. Suppose that there is one seller who has indivisible items and multiple buyers who want to purchase a combination of the items. The seller wants to…
We derive the revenue-optimal efficient (welfare-maximizing) mechanism in a general multidimensional mechanism design setting when type spaces -- that is, the underlying domains from which agents' values come from -- can capture arbitrarily…
We consider a monopoly seller who optimally auctions a single object to a single potential buyer, with a known distribution of valuations. We show that a tight lower bound on the seller's expected revenue is $1/e$ times the geometric…
Budget feasible mechanism design studies procurement combinatorial auctions where the sellers have private costs to produce items, and the buyer(auctioneer) aims to maximize a social valuation function on subsets of items, under the budget…
Selling a single item to $n$ self-interested buyers is a fundamental problem in economics, where the two objectives typically considered are welfare maximization and revenue maximization. Since the optimal mechanisms are often impractical…
We characterize optimal mechanisms for the multiple-good monopoly problem and provide a framework to find them. We show that a mechanism is optimal if and only if a measure $\mu$ derived from the buyer's type distribution satisfies certain…
We consider (approximate) revenue maximization in auctions where the distribution on input valuations is given via "black box" access to samples from the distribution. We observe that the number of samples required -- the sample complexity…
There has been much recent work on the revenue-raising properties of truthful mechanisms for selling goods to selfish bidders. Typically the revenue of a mechanism is compared against a benchmark (such as, the maximum revenue obtainable by…
We make three different types of contributions to cost-sharing: First, we identify several new classes of combinatorial cost functions that admit incentive-compatible mechanisms achieving both a constant-factor approximation of…
We study multi-buyer multi-item sequential item pricing mechanisms for revenue maximization with the goal of approximating a natural fractional relaxation -- the ex ante optimal revenue. We assume that buyers' values are subadditive but…
This paper reexamines the classic problem of revenue maximization in single-item auctions with $n$ buyers under the lens of the robust optimization framework. The celebrated Myerson's mechanism is the format that maximizes the seller's…
We study the revenue guarantees and approximability of item pricing. Recent work shows that with $n$ heterogeneous items, item-pricing guarantees an $O(\log n)$ approximation to the optimal revenue achievable by any (buy-many) mechanism,…
We study multi-agent contract design with combinatorial actions, under budget constraints, and for a broad class of objective functions, including profit (principal's utility), reward, and welfare. Our first result is a strong…
Classical Bayesian mechanism design relies on the common prior assumption, but such prior is often not available in practice. We study the design of prior-independent mechanisms that relax this assumption: the seller is selling an…
We study the problem of differentially private optimization with linear constraints when the right-hand-side of the constraints depends on private data. This type of problem appears in many applications, especially resource allocation.…
This study introduces an optimal mechanism in a dynamic stochastic knapsack environment. The model features a single seller who has a fixed quantity of a perfectly divisible item. Impatient buyers with a piece-wise linear utility function…
In this paper we consider multidimensional mechanism design problem for selling discrete substitutable items to a group of buyers. Previous work on this problem mostly focus on stochastic description of valuations used by the seller.…
This paper studies a monopolist selling multiple goods to a consumer with one-dimensional private types. I provide a sufficient condition under which the monopolist's problem is equivalent to finding the upper envelope of the marginal…
One of the main challenges in mechanism design is to carefully engineer incentives ensuring truthfulness while maintaining strong social welfare approximation guarantees. But these objectives are often in conflict, making it impossible to…
Posted price mechanisms (PPM) constitute one of the predominant practices to price goods in online marketplaces and their revenue guarantees have been a central object of study in the last decade. We consider a basic setting where the…