相关论文: The Simplicity of Optimal Dynamic Mechanisms

The transition to auto-bidding in online advertising has shifted the focus of auction theory from quasi-linear utility maximization to value maximization subject to financial constraints. We study mechanism design for buyers with private…

This work is motivated by our collaboration with a large consumer packaged goods (CPG) company. We have found that while the company appreciates the advantages of dynamic pricing, they deem it operationally much easier to plan out a static…

The problem of designing a profit-maximizing, Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanism with flexible consumers and costly heterogeneous supply is considered. In our setup, each consumer is associated with a…

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…

We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…

An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…

The principle of optimality is a fundamental aspect of dynamic programming, which states that the optimal solution to a dynamic optimization problem can be found by combining the optimal solutions to its sub-problems. While this principle…

We consider the problem of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanism design in settings where agents' types evolve over time as a function of their (both public and private) experience with items that are auctioned repeatedly over an infinite…

We study the optimal liquidation problem in a market model where the bid price follows a geometric pure jump process whose local characteristics are driven by an unobservable finite-state Markov chain and by the liquidation rate. This model…

We provide simple and approximately revenue-optimal mechanisms in the multi-item multi-bidder settings. We unify and improve all previous results, as well as generalize the results to broader cases. In particular, we prove that the better…

Multi-item revenue-optimal mechanisms are known to be extremely complex, often offering buyers randomized lotteries of goods. In the standard buy-one model, it is known that optimal mechanisms can yield revenue infinitely higher than that…

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…

Online markets are a part of everyday life, and their rules are governed by algorithms. Assuming participants are inherently self-interested, well designed rules can help to increase social welfare. Many algorithms for online markets are…

Pricing decisions are often made when market information is still poor. In turn, existing theoretical models often reason about the response of optimal prices to changing market characteristics without exploiting all available information…

We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…

When selling many goods with independent valuations, we develop a distributionally robust framework, consisting of a two-player game between seller and nature. The seller has only limited knowledge about the value distribution. The seller…

We provide an elementary proof that revenue-maximizing mechanisms exist in multi-parameter settings whenever the distribution of valuations has finite expectation.

We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…

Recently, there is growing interest and need for dynamic pricing algorithms, especially, in the field of online marketplaces by offering smart pricing options for big online stores. We present an approach to adjust prices based on the…

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…