mechanism design

Generalized Principal-Agent Problem with a Learning Agent

We study a repeated Bayesian persuasion problem (and more generally, any generalized principal-agent problem with complete information) where the principal does not have commitment power and the agent uses algorithms to learn to respond to the …

From Monopoly to Competition: Optimal Contests Prevail

We study competition among contests in a general model that allows for an arbitrary and heterogeneous space of contest design and symmetric contestants. The goal of the contest designers is to maximize the contestants’ sum of efforts. Our main result …

How Does Independence Help Generalization? Sample Complexity of ERM on Product Distributions

While many classical notions of learnability (e.g., PAC learnability) are distribution-free, utilizing the specific structures of an input distribution may improve learning performance. For example, a product distribution on a multi-dimensional input …

Nash Convergence of Mean-Based Learning Algorithms in First Price Auctions

Understanding the convergence properties of learning dynamics in repeated auctions is a timely and important question in the area of learning in auctions, with numerous applications in, e.g., online advertising markets. This work focuses on repeated …

A Game-Theoretic Analysis of the Empirical Revenue Maximization Algorithm with Endogenous Sampling

The Empirical Revenue Maximization (ERM) is one of the most important price learning algorithms in auction design: as the literature shows it can learn approximately optimal reserve prices for revenue-maximizing auctioneers in both repeated auctions …

Learning Utilities and Equilibria in Non-Truthful Auctions

In non-truthful auctions, agents' utility for a strategy depends on the strategies of the opponents and also the prior distribution over their private types; the set of Bayes Nash equilibria generally has an intricate dependence on the prior. Using …

Private Data Manipulation in Optimal Sponsored Search Auction

In this paper, we revisit the sponsored search auction as a repeated auction. We view it as a learning and exploiting task of the seller against the private data distribution of the buyers. We model such a game between the seller and buyers by a …