Related papers: On Risk Aversion in Auctions
We study reserve prices in auctions with independent private values when bidders are expectations-based loss averse. We find that the optimal public reserve price excludes fewer bidder types than under risk neutrality. Moreover, we show…
DeMarzo et al. (2005) consider auctions in which bids are selected from a completely ordered family of securities whose values are tied to the resource being auctioned. The paper defines a notion of relative steepness of families of…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
We examine ``tournament'' second-price auctions in which $N$ bidders compete for the right to participate in a second stage and contend against bidder $N+1$. When the first $N$ bidders are committed so that their bids cannot be changed in…
Motivated by online advertising auctions, we study auction design in repeated auctions played by simple Artificial Intelligence algorithms (Q-learning). We find that first-price auctions with no additional feedback lead to tacit-collusive…
We study the question of setting and testing reserve prices in single item auctions when the bidders are not identical. At a high level, there are two generalizations of the standard second price auction: in the lazy version we first…
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…
We study the problem of auction design for advertising platforms that face strategic advertisers who are bidding across platforms. Each advertiser's goal is to maximize their total value or conversions while satisfying some constraint(s)…
When bidders bid on complex objects, they might be unaware of characteristics effecting their valuations. We assume that each buyer's valuation is a sum of independent random variables, one for each characteristic. When a bidder is unaware…
We study simple and approximately optimal auctions for agents with a particular form of risk-averse preferences. We show that, for symmetric agents, the optimal revenue (given a prior distribution over the agent preferences) can be…
A single unit of a good is sold to one of two bidders. Each bidder has either a high prior valuation or a low prior valuation for the good. Their prior valuations are independently and identically distributed. Each bidder may observe an…
We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this class,…
A speculator can take advantage of a procurement auction by acquiring items for sale before the auction. The accumulated market power can then be exercised in the auction and may lead to a large enough gain to cover the acquisition costs. I…
Second-price auctions with deposits are frequently used in blockchain environments. An auction takes place on-chain: bidders deposit an amount that fully covers their bid (but possibly exceeds it) in a smart contract. The deposit is used as…
We provide the first direct test of how the credibility of an auction format affects bidding behavior and final outcomes. To do so, we conduct a series of laboratory experiments where the role of the seller is played by a human subject who…
With the advent and increasing consolidation of e-commerce, digital advertising has very recently replaced traditional advertising as the main marketing force in the economy. In the past four years, a particularly important development in…
We uncover a close link between outside options and risk attitude: when a decision-maker gains access to an outside option, her behaviour becomes less risk-averse, and conversely, any observed decrease of risk-aversion can be explained by…
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this…
In this paper, we deal with the uncertainty of bidding for display advertising. Similar to the financial market trading, real-time bidding (RTB) based display advertising employs an auction mechanism to automate the impression level media…
Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…