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Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
In Stackelberg security games when information about the attacker's payoffs is uncertain, algorithms have been proposed to learn the optimal defender commitment by interacting with the attacker and observing their best responses. In this…
We consider a trader who aims to liquidate a large position in the presence of an arbitrageur who hopes to profit from the trader's activity. The arbitrageur is uncertain about the trader's position and learns from observed price…
The connection between games and no-regret algorithms has been widely studied in the literature. A fundamental result is that when all players play no-regret strategies, this produces a sequence of actions whose time-average is a…
Internet search companies sell advertisement slots based on users' search queries via an auction. While there has been a lot of attention on the auction process and its game-theoretic aspects, our focus is on the advertisers. In particular,…
First-price auctions have recently gained significant traction in digital advertising markets, exemplified by Google's transition from second-price to first-price auctions. Unlike in second-price auctions, where bidding one's private…
In non-truthful auctions such as first-price and all-pay auctions, the independent strategic behaviors of bidders, with the corresponding Bayes-Nash equilibrium notion, are notoriously difficult to characterize and can cause undesirable…
We study revenue optimization learning algorithms for repeated posted-price auctions where a seller interacts with a single strategic buyer that holds a fixed private valuation for a good and seeks to maximize his cumulative discounted…
In this thesis, we research learning algorithms for optimal decision making in two different contexts, Reinforcement Learning in Part I and Auction Design in Part II. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning that is…
We propose a new architecture to approximately learn incentive compatible, revenue-maximizing auctions from sampled valuations. Our architecture uses the Sinkhorn algorithm to perform a differentiable bipartite matching which allows the…
In Bayesian single-item auctions, a monotone bidding strategy--one that prescribes a higher bid for a higher value type--can be equivalently represented as a partition of the quantile space into consecutive intervals corresponding to…
High-stakes auctions are often preceded by nonbinding communication between bidders and the seller. Motivated by these practices, this paper examines a two-period model in which two bidders send private cheap talk messages to the seller…
We study the problem of finding the optimal bidding strategy for an advertiser in a multi-platform auction setting. The competition on a platform is captured by a value and a cost function, mapping bidding strategies to value and cost…
We examine trade-offs among stakeholders in ad auctions. Our metrics are the revenue for the utility of the auctioneer, the number of clicks for the utility of the users and the welfare for the utility of the advertisers. We show how to…
Sequential allocation is a simple mechanism for sharing multiple indivisible items. We study strategic behavior in sequential allocation. In particular, we consider Nash dynamics, as well as the computation and Pareto optimality of pure…
In revenue maximization of selling a digital product in a social network, the utility of an agent is often considered to have two parts: a private valuation, and linearly additive influences from other agents. We study the incomplete…
The current art in optimal combinatorial auctions is limited to handling the case of single units of multiple items, with each bidder bidding on exactly one bundle (single minded bidders). This paper extends the current art by proposing an…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices,…
When deployed in the world, a learning agent such as a recommender system or a chatbot often repeatedly interacts with another learning agent (such as a user) over time. In many such two-agent systems, each agent learns separately and the…