Related papers: Reduced Forms: Feasibility, Extremality, Optimalit…
The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…
We introduce several new estimation methods that leverage shape constraints in auction models to estimate various objects of interest, including the distribution of a bidder's valuations, the bidder's ex ante expected surplus, and the…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
In digital goods auctions, there is an auctioneer who sells an item with unlimited supply to a set of potential buyers, and the objective is to design truthful auction to maximize the total profit of the auctioneer. Motivated from an…
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 the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…
We investigate revenue guarantees for auction mechanisms in a model where a distribution is specified for each bidder, but only some of the distributions are correct. The subset of bidders whose distribution is correctly specified…
We consider the problem of the optimization of bidding strategies in prior-dependent revenue-maximizing auctions, when the seller fixes the reserve prices based on the bid distributions. Our study is done in the setting where one bidder is…
We consider budget feasible mechanisms for procurement auctions with additive valuation functions. For the divisible case, where agents can be allocated fractionally, there exists an optimal mechanism with approximation guarantee $e/(e-1)$…
Many auction settings implicitly or explicitly require that bidders are treated equally ex-ante. This may be because discrimination is philosophically or legally impermissible, or because it is practically difficult to implement or…
Traditionally, the Bayesian optimal auction design problem has been considered either when the bidder values are i.i.d., or when each bidder is individually identifiable via her value distribution. The latter is a reasonable approach when…
We study the optimal behavior of a bidder in a real-time auction subject to the requirement that a specified collections of heterogeneous items be acquired within given time constraints. The problem facing this bidder is cast as a…
A seller wants to sell a good to a set of bidders using a credible mechanism. We show that when the seller has private information about her cost, it is impossible for a static mechanism to achieve the optimal revenue. In particular, even…
We introduce locality: a new property of multi-bidder auctions that formally separates the simplicity of optimal single-dimensional multi-bidder auctions from the complexity of optimal multi-dimensional multi-bidder auctions. Specifically,…
We provide efficient estimation methods for first- and second-price auctions under independent (asymmetric) private values and partial observability. Given a finite set of observations, each comprising the identity of the winner and the…
We construct prior-free auctions with constant-factor approximation guarantees with ordered bidders, in both unlimited and limited supply settings. We compare the expected revenue of our auctions on a bid vector to the monotone price…
We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to…
We study the revenue comparison problem of auctions when the seller has a maxmin expected utility preference. The seller holds a set of priors around some reference belief, interpreted as an approximating model of the true probability law…
Auction theory traditionally assumes that bidders' valuation distributions are known to the auctioneer, such as in the celebrated, revenue-optimal Myerson auction. However, this theory does not describe how the auctioneer comes to possess…
We are interested in the setting where a seller sells sequentially arriving items, one per period, via a dynamic auction. At the beginning of each period, each buyer draws a private valuation for the item to be sold in that period and this…