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Free, publicly-accessible full text available June 15, 2026
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We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution $$D$$ in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational and will perfectly reason about how their bids today affect the seller's decisions tomorrow. In this work we initiate a different direction: the buyer simply runs a no-regret learning algorithm over possible bids. We provide a fairly complete characterization of optimal auctions for the seller in this domain. Specifically: 1) If the buyer bids according to EXP3 (or any ``mean-based'' learning algorithm), then the seller can extract expected revenue arbitrarily close to the expected welfare. This auction is independent of the buyer's valuation $$D$$, but somewhat unnatural as it is sometimes in the buyer's interest to overbid. 2) There exists a learning algorithm $$\mathcal{A}$$ such that if the buyer bids according to $$\mathcal{A}$$ then the optimal strategy for the seller is simply to post the Myerson reserve for $$D$$ every round. 3) If the buyer bids according to EXP3 (or any ``mean-based'' learning algorithm), but the seller is restricted to ``natural'' auction formats where overbidding is dominated (e.g. Generalized First-Price or Generalized Second-Price), then the optimal strategy for the seller is a pay-your-bid format with decreasing reserves over time. Moreover, the seller's optimal achievable revenue is characterized by a linear program, and can be unboundedly better than the best truthful auction yet simultaneously unboundedly worse than the expected welfare.more » « less
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