Related papers: Pre-auction strategic communication
Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…
We model a procurement scenario in which two \textit{imperfect} bidders act simultaneously on behalf of a single buyer, a configuration common in display advertising and referred to as \textit{side-by-side bidding} but largely unexplored in…
In a multiple-object auction, every bidder tries to win as many objects as possible with a bidding algorithm. This paper studies position-randomized auctions, which form a special class of multiple-object auctions where a bidding algorithm…
Bidding is a key element of search advertising, but the variation in bidders' valuations and strategies is often overlooked. Disclosing bid information helps uncover this heterogeneity and enables platforms to tailor their disclosure…
We study the limits of an information intermediary in the classical Bayesian auction, where a revenue-maximizing seller sells one item to $n$ buyers with independent private values. In addition, we have an intermediary who knows the buyers'…
In practice, most auction mechanisms are not strategy-proof, so equilibrium analysis is required to predict bidding behavior. In many auctions, though, an exact equilibrium is not known and one would like to understand whether -- manually…
In the standard formulation of mechanism design, a key assumption is that the designer has reliable information and technology to determine a prior distribution on types of the agents. In the meanwhile, as pointed out by the Wilson's…
This paper studies optimal auction design when valuations depend endogenously on post-auction collaboration between the seller and the winning bidder. Both parties exert non-contractible efforts after the auction, generating a double moral…
Simultaneous item auctions are simple procedures for allocating items to bidders with potentially complex preferences over different item sets. In a simultaneous auction, every bidder submits bids on all items simultaneously. The allocation…
Mature internet advertising platforms offer high-level campaign management tools to help advertisers run their campaigns, often abstracting away the intricacies of how each ad is placed and focusing on aggregate metrics of interest to…
The idea of this paper is an advanced game concept. This concept is expected to model non-monetary bilateral cooperations between self-interested agents. Such non-monetary cases are social cooperations like allocation of high level jobs or…
We study equilibrium investment into bidding and latency reduction for different sequencing policies. For a batch auction design, we observe that bidders shade bids according to the likelihood that competing bidders land in the current…
We analyze the optimal information design in a click-through auction with fixed valuations per click, but stochastic click-through rates. While the auctioneer takes as given the auction rule of the click-through auction, namely the…
This paper studies learning in markets with aggregate uncertainty about whether trade is efficient. A long-lived seller offers prices to buyers, who are short-lived and arrive according to a Poisson process. A hidden state determines…
In this work we consider selling items using a sequential first price auction mechanism. We generalize the assumption of conservative bidding to extensive form games (henceforth optimistic conservative bidding), and show that for both…
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…
With the increasing use of auctions in online advertising, there has been a large effort to study seller revenue maximization, following Myerson's seminal work, both theoretically and practically. We take the point of view of the buyer in…
I consider an environment in which a decision maker faces uncertainty and privately holds information in the form of a signal about the true state of the world. The decision maker purchases additional information from a data broker before…
We study the communication complexity of welfare maximization in combinatorial auctions with $m$ items and two subadditive bidders. A $\frac{1}{2}$-approximation can be guaranteed by a trivial randomized protocol with zero communication, or…
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…