skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Optimal Auction Design With Common Values: An Informationally Robust Approach
A profit‐maximizing seller has a single unit of a good to sell. The bidders have a pure common value that is drawn from a distribution that is commonly known. The seller does not know the bidders' beliefs about the value and thinks that beliefs are designed adversarially by Nature to minimize profit. We construct a strong maxmin solution to this joint mechanism design and information design problem, consisting of a mechanism, an information structure, and an equilibrium, such that neither the seller nor Nature can move profit in their respective preferred directions, even if the deviator can select the new equilibrium. The mechanism and information structure solve a family of maxmin mechanism design and minmax information design problems, regardless of how an equilibrium is selected. The maxmin mechanism takes the form of a proportional auction : each bidder submits a one‐dimensional bid, the aggregate allocation and aggregate payment depend on the aggregate bid, and individual allocations and payments are proportional to bids. We report a number of additional properties of the maxmin mechanisms, including what happens as the number of bidders grows large and robustness with respect to the prior over the value.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1757222
PAR ID:
10276449
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Econometrica
Volume:
89
Issue:
3
ISSN:
0012-9682
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1313 to 1360
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ; (, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)
    Bringmann, Karl; Grohe, Martin; Puppis, Gabriele; Svensson, Ola (Ed.)
    We study information design in click-through auctions, in which the bidders/advertisers bid for winning an opportunity to show their ads but only pay for realized clicks. The payment may or may not happen, and its probability is called the click-through rate (CTR). This auction format is widely used in the industry of online advertising. Bidders have private values, whereas the seller has private information about each bidder’s CTRs. We are interested in the seller’s problem of partially revealing CTR information to maximize revenue. Information design in click-through auctions turns out to be intriguingly different from almost all previous studies in this space since any revealed information about CTRs will never affect bidders' bidding behaviors - they will always bid their true value per click - but only affect the auction’s allocation and payment rule. In some sense, this makes information design effectively a constrained mechanism design problem. Our first result is an FPTAS to compute an approximately optimal mechanism under a constant number of bidders. The design of this algorithm leverages Bayesian bidder values which help to "smooth" the seller’s revenue function and lead to better tractability. The design of this FPTAS is complex and primarily algorithmic. Our second main result pursues the design of "simple" mechanisms that are approximately optimal yet more practical. We primarily focus on the two-bidder situation, which is already notoriously challenging as demonstrated in recent works. When bidders' CTR distribution is symmetric, we develop a simple prior-free signaling scheme, whose construction relies on a parameter termed optimal signal ratio. The constructed scheme provably obtains a good approximation as long as the maximum and minimum of bidders' value density functions do not differ much. 
    more » « less
  2. ; ; (, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik)
    Bonneau, Joseph; Weinberg, S Matthew (Ed.)
    In a typical decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), people organize themselves into a group that is programmatically managed. DAOs can act as bidders in auctions (with ConstitutionDAO being one notable example), with a DAO’s bid typically treated by the auctioneer as if it had been submitted by an individual, without regard to any details of the internal DAO dynamics. The goal of this paper is to study auctions in which the bidders are DAOs. More precisely, we consider the design of two-level auctions in which the "participants" are groups of bidders rather than individuals. Bidders form DAOs to pool resources, but must then also negotiate the terms by which the DAO’s winnings are shared. We model the outcome of a DAO’s negotiations through an aggregation function (which aggregates DAO members' bids into a single group bid) and a budget-balanced cost-sharing mechanism (that determines DAO members' access to the DAO’s allocation and distributes the aggregate payment demanded from the DAO to its members). DAOs' bids are processed by a direct-revelation mechanism that has no knowledge of the DAO structure (and thus treats each DAO as an individual). Within this framework, we pursue two-level mechanisms that are incentive-compatible (with truthful bidding a dominant strategy for each member of each DAO) and approximately welfare-optimal. We prove that, even in the case of a single-item auction, the DAO dynamics hidden from the outer mechanism preclude incentive-compatible welfare maximization: No matter what the outer mechanism and the cost-sharing mechanisms used by DAOs, the welfare of the resulting two-level mechanism can be a ≈ ln n factor less than the optimal welfare (in the worst case over DAOs and valuation profiles). We complement this lower bound with a natural two-level mechanism that achieves a matching approximate welfare guarantee. This upper bound also extends to multi-item auctions in which individuals have additive valuations. Finally, we show that our positive results cannot be extended much further: Even in multi-item settings in which bidders have unit-demand valuations, truthful two-level mechanisms form a highly restricted class and as a consequence cannot guarantee any non-trivial approximation of the maximum social welfare. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; (, American Economic Review: Insights)
    We characterize the revenue-maximizing information structure in the second-price auction. The seller faces a trade-off: more information improves the efficiency of the allocation but creates higher information rents for bidders. The information disclosure policy that maximizes the revenue of the seller is to fully reveal low values (where competition is high) but to pool high values (where competition is low). The size of the pool is determined by a critical quantile that is independent of the distribution of values and only dependent on the number of bidders. We discuss how this policy provides a rationale for conflation in digital advertising. (JEL D44, D82, D83, M37) 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; ; (, ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS))
    Cremers, Cas; Kirda, Engin (Ed.)
    We introduce the first practical protocols for fully decentralized sealed-bid auctions using timed commitments. Timed commitments ensure that the auction is finalized fairly even if all participants drop out after posting bids or if bidders collude to try to learn the bidder’s bid value. Our protocols rely on a novel non-malleable timed commitment scheme which efficiently supports range proofs to establish that bidders have sufficient funds to cover a hidden bid value. This allows us to penalize users who abandon bids for exactly the bid value, while supporting simultaneous bidding in multiple auctions with a shared collateral pool. Our protocols are concretely efficient and we have implemented them in an Ethereum- compatible smart contract which automatically enforces payment and delivery of an auctioned digital asset. 
    more » « less
  5. ; ; (, Journal of political economy)
    Greg Kaplan (Ed.)
    Using bid-level data from discriminatory auctions for Mexican government bonds, we demonstrate that asymmetric information about default risk is a key friction in sovereign bond markets. We document that large bidders achieve higher bid-acceptance rates than other bidders despite paying no more for executed bids.We then propose a new model of primary markets in which investors may differ in wealth, risk aversion, market power, and information. Only asymmetric information can qualitatively account for our empirical finding, and asymmetric information about rare disasters can quantitatively match bidding and yield moments. Counterfactuals reveal substantial effects of asymmetric information on yields. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email