We study an auction design problem where a seller aims to sell a single item to multiple bidders with independent private values. The seller knows only an upper bound on these values and does not know their distribution. The objective is to devise a deterministic auction mechanism effective across a broad set of distributions. We … Read more
We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the agent’s private type. Even though the principal does not know the agents’ types, she … Read more
In this paper, we provide a characterization of the expected value of monotone submodular set functions with $n$ pairwise independent random inputs. Inspired by the notion of “correlation gap”, we study the ratio of the maximum expected value of a function with arbitrary dependence among the random inputs with given marginal probabilities to the maximum … Read more
We study a robust monopoly pricing problem where a seller aspires to sell an item to a buyer. We assume that the seller, unaware of the buyer’s willingness to pay, ambitiously optimizes over a space of all individual rational and incentive compatible mechanisms with a regret-type objective criterion. Using robust optimization, Kocyigit et al. (2021) … Read more
We study a robust auction design problem with a minimax regret objective, where a seller seeks a mechanism for selling multiple items to multiple bidders with additive values. The seller knows that the bidders’ values range over a box uncertainty set but has no information on their probability distribution. The robust auction design model we … Read more
We study a robust monopoly pricing problem with a minimax regret objective, where a seller endeavors to sell multiple goods to a single buyer, only knowing that the buyer’s values for the goods range over a rectangular uncertainty set. We interpret this pricing problem as a zero-sum game between the seller, who chooses a selling … Read more
We consider the coordination of planning decisions of a single product in a supply chain composed of one supplier and one retailer by using contracts. We assume that the retailer has the market power to impose his optimal replenishment plan to the supplier. Our concern is on the minimization of the supplier’s cost. In order … Read more
We study a mechanism design problem where an indivisible good is auctioned to multiple bidders, for each of whom it has a private value that is unknown to the seller and the other bidders. The agents perceive the ensemble of all bidder values as a random vector governed by an ambiguous probability distribution, which belongs … Read more
We completely characterize deterministic strategy-proof and group strategy-proof mechanisms on single-sinked public policy domain. The single-sinked domain can be used to model any allocation problem where a single output must be chosen in an interval with the assumption that agents’ preferences have a single most loathful point (the sink) in the interval, and the preferences … Read more
We demonstrate the use of linear programming techniques in the analysis of mechanism design problems. We use these techniques to analyze the extent to which a first-price auction is robust to collusion when, contrary to some prior literature on collusion at first-price auctions, the cartel cannot prevent its members from bidding at the auction. In … Read more