Related papers: Optimal linear-payment auction design with afterma…

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…

Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…

This paper studies a wireless network where multiple users cooperate with each other to improve the overall network performance. Our goal is to design an optimal distributed power allocation algorithm that enables user cooperation, in…

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…

In this paper, we develop a new method for finding an optimal biddingstrategy in sequential auctions, using a dynamic programming technique. Theexisting method assumes that the utility of a user is represented in anadditive form. Thus, the…

We study the problem of multi-dimensional revenue maximization when selling $m$ items to a buyer that has additive valuations for them, drawn from a (possibly correlated) prior distribution. Unlike traditional Bayesian auction design, we…

We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…

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…

We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…

When agents with independent priors bid for a single item, Myerson's optimal auction maximizes expected revenue, whereas Vickrey's second-price auction optimizes social welfare. We address the natural question of trade-offs between the two…

We study the optimal mechanism design problem faced by a market intermediary who makes revenue by connecting buyers and sellers. We first show that the optimal intermediation protocol has substantial structure: it is the solution to an…

This paper studies mechanism design for revenue maximization in a distribution-reporting setting, where the auctioneer does not know the buyers' true value distributions. Instead, each buyer reports and commits to a bid distribution in the…

In this paper, we consider the problem of optimizing the revenue a web publisher gets through real-time bidding (i.e. from ads sold in real-time auctions) and direct (i.e. from ads sold through contracts agreed in advance). We consider a…

Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…

A seller is selling a pair of divisible complementary goods to an agent. The agent consumes the goods only in a specific ratio and freely disposes of excess in either goods. The value of the bundle and the ratio are private information of…

While the auto-bidding literature predominantly considers independent bidding, we investigate the coordination problem among multiple auto-bidders in online advertising platforms. Two motivating scenarios are: collaborative bidding among…

A seller chooses a reserve price in a second-price auction to maximize worst-case expected revenue when she knows only the mean of value distribution and an upper bound on either values themselves or variance. Values are private and iid.…

A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…

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…

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…