The Limits of an Information Intermediary in Auction Design
The Limits of an Information Intermediary in Auction Design
复制标题
拍卖设计中信息中介的局限性
DOI:
10.1145/3490486.3538370
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发表时间:
2022
期刊:
影响因子:
--
通讯作者:
Wang, Kangning
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Alijani, Reza;Banerjee, Siddhartha;Munagala, Kamesh;Wang, Kangning
We study the limits of an information intermediary in the classical Bayesian auction, where a revenue-maximizing seller sells one item to n buyers with independent private values. In addition, we have an intermediary who knows the buyers' private values, and can map these to a public signal so as to increase consumer surplus. This model generalizes the single-buyer setting proposed by Bergemann, Brooks, and Morris, who present a signaling scheme that raises the optimal consumer surplus, by guaranteeing that the item is always sold and the seller gets the same revenue as without signaling. Our work aims to understand how this result ports to the setting with multiple buyers.We likewise define the benchmark for the optimal consumer surplus: one where the auction is efficient (i.e., the item is always sold to the highest-valued buyer) and the revenue of the seller is unchanged. We show that no signaling scheme can guarantee this benchmark even for n=2 buyers with 2-point valuation distributions. Indeed, no signaling scheme can be efficient while preserving any non-trivial fraction of the original consumer surplus, and no signaling scheme can guarantee consumer surplus better than a factor of 1/2 compared to the benchmark. These impossibility results are existential (beyond computational), and provide a sharp separation between the single and multi-buyer settings.In light of this impossibility, we develop signaling schemes with good approximation guarantees to the benchmark. Our main technical result is an O(1)-approximation for i.i.d. regular buyers, via signaling schemes that are conceptually simple and computable in polynomial time. We also present an extension to the case of general independent distributions.
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DOI:
10.2139/ssrn.3145000
发表时间:
2017-02
期刊:
ERN: Information Asymmetry Models (Topic)
影响因子:
--
作者:
D. Bergemann;S. Morris
通讯作者:
D. Bergemann;S. Morris
DOI:
10.1145/3490486.3538335
发表时间:
2022
期刊:
EC '22: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation
影响因子:
--
作者:
Ko, Shao-Heng;Munagala, Kamesh
通讯作者:
Munagala, Kamesh
DOI:
10.1137/1.9781611975994.149
发表时间:
2020
期刊:
Proceedings of the Annual ACMSIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
影响因子:
--
作者:
Cummings, Rachel;Devanur, Nikhil R.;Huang, Zhiyi;Wang, Xianging
通讯作者:
Wang, Xianging
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2017
期刊:
SeCO Workshops
影响因子:
--
作者:
S. Dughmi
通讯作者:
S. Dughmi
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2007
期刊:
ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms
影响因子:
--
作者:
Edith Elkind
通讯作者:
Edith Elkind