Related papers: Robust Mechanism Design with Anonymous Information
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…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
We study probabilistic single-item second-price auctions where the item is characterized by a set of attributes. The auctioneer knows the actual instantiation of all the attributes, but he may choose to reveal only a subset of these…
In multi-item screening, optimal selling mechanisms are challenging to characterize and implement, even with full knowledge of valuation distributions. In this paper, we aim to develop tractable, interpretable, and implementable mechanisms…
This paper studies some basic problems in a multiple-object auction model using methodologies from theoretical computer science. We are especially concerned with situations where an adversary bidder knows the bidding algorithms of all the…
Unexpected advertising items in sponsored search may reduce users' reliance on organic search, resulting in hidden cost for the e-commerce platform. To address this problem and promote sustainable growth, we propose a dynamic reserve price…
We consider dynamic pricing schemes in online settings where selfish agents generate online events. Previous work on online mechanisms has dealt almost entirely with the goal of maximizing social welfare or revenue in an auction settings.…
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…
We initiate the study of efficient mechanism design with guaranteed good properties even when players participate in multiple different mechanisms simultaneously or sequentially. We define the class of smooth mechanisms, related to smooth…
This paper presents the first polynomial-time algorithm for position and matroid auction environments that learns, from samples from an unknown bounded valuation distribution, an auction with expected revenue arbitrarily close to the…
We study the problem of selling identical goods to n unit-demand bidders in a setting in which the total supply of goods is unknown to the mechanism. Items arrive dynamically, and the seller must make the allocation and payment decisions…
We consider a revenue-maximizing seller with a single item for sale to multiple buyers with i.i.d. valuations. Akbarpour and Li (2020) show that the only optimal, credible, strategyproof auction is the ascending price auction with reserves…
We study a mechanism design problem where a seller aims to allocate a good to multiple bidders, each with a private value. The seller supports or favors a specific group, referred to as the minority group. Specifically, the seller requires…
Reserve prices are widely used in practice. The problem of designing revenue-optimal auctions based on reserve price has drawn much attention in the auction design community. Although they have been extensively studied, most developments…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
This paper studies the design of mechanisms that are robust to misspecification. We introduce a novel notion of robustness that connects a variety of disparate approaches and study its implications in a wide class of mechanism design…
Bid shading has become a standard practice in the digital advertising industry, in which most auctions for advertising (ad) opportunities are now of first price type. Given an ad opportunity, performing bid shading requires estimating not…
We study deterministic monopoly pricing under partial knowledge of the market, where the seller has access only to summary statistics of the valuation distribution, such as the mean, dispersion, and maximum value. Using tools from…
Recent empirical work demonstrates that online advertisement can exhibit bias in the delivery of ads across users even when all advertisers bid in a non-discriminatory manner. We study the design of ad auctions that, given fair bids, are…
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…