arXiv subjects

Marek Bojko

Publications and source records attributed to Marek Bojko.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Data-Driven Mechanism Design: Jointly Eliciting Preferences and Information

We study mechanism design in environments where agents have private preferences and private information about a common payoff-relevant state. In such settings with multi-dimensional types, standard mechanisms fail to implement efficient allocations. We address this limitation by proposing data-driven mechanisms that condition transfers on additional post-allocation information, modeled as an estimator of the payoff-relevant state. Our mechanisms extend the classic Vickrey-Clarke-Groves framework. We show they achieve exact implementation in posterior equilibrium when the state is fully revealed or utilities are affine in an unbiased estimator. With a consistent estimator, they achieve approximate implementation that converges to exact implementation as the estimator converges, and we provide bounds on the convergence rate. We demonstrate applications to digital advertising auctions and AI shopping assistants, where user engagement naturally reveals relevant information, and to procurement auctions with consumer spot markets, where additional information arises from a pricing game played by the same agents.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2024

Revenue Variance Minimization: Beyond First Price Auctions

We study revenue variance in the sale of $k$ homogeneous items to risk-neutral, unit-demand bidders with independent private values. Although the Revenue Equivalence Theorem implies that standard auctions generate the same expected revenue, the distribution of revenue differs across mechanisms. Prior work shows that, in single-item environments with ex-post individual rationality (IR), the first-price auction minimizes revenue variance. We show that this result is fragile. Under interim IR, the optimality of the first-price auction breaks down in asymmetric single-item settings, and we characterize the variance-minimizing mechanisms for any implementable allocation rule in this environment. In multi-item symmetric regular environments with interim IR, we construct a mechanism that implements the efficient allocation and guarantees constant revenue while maintaining non-negative payments. Under ex-post IR, we show that revenue variance can be reduced relative to winner-pays-bid formats by introducing negative correlations in payments. Nevertheless, we show that the variance ranking between the winner-pays-bid auction and the uniform $(k+1)$-st price auction is maintained in multi-unit settings.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2020

The Probabilistic Serial and Random Priority Mechanisms with Minimum Quotas

Consider the problem of assigning indivisible objects to agents with strict ordinal preferences over objects, where each agent is interested in consuming at most one object, and objects have integer minimum and maximum quotas. We define an assignment to be feasible if it satisfies all quotas and assume such an assignment always exists. The Probabilistic Serial (PS) and Random Priority (RP) mechanisms are generalised based on the same intuitive idea: Allow agents to consume their most preferred available object until the total mass of agents yet to be allocated is exactly equal to the remaining amount of unfilled lower quotas; in this case, we restrict agents' menus to objects which are yet to fill their minimum quotas. We show the mechanisms satisfy the same criteria as their classical counterparts: PS is ordinally efficient, envy-free and weakly strategy-proof; RP is strategy-proof, weakly envy-free but not ordinally efficient.

econ.TH↗