Practical or legal constraints often restrict auctions to being symmetric (anonymous and nondiscriminatory). We examine when this restriction prevents a seller from achieving his objectives. In an independent private value setting with heterogenous buyers, we characterize the set of incentive...

Government procurement and allocation programs often use subsidies and set-asides favoring small businesses and other target groups to address fairness concerns. These concerns are in addition to standard objectives such as efficiency and revenue. We study the design of the optimal mechanism for...

We consider a dynamic auction problem motivated by the traditional single-leg, multi-period revenue management problem. A seller with C units to sell faces potential buyers with unit demand who arrive and depart over the course of T time periods. The time at which a buyer arrives, her value for...

We consider an environment where potential buyers of an indivisible good have liquidity constraints, in that they cannot pay more than their `budget' regardless of their valuation. A buyer's valuation for the good as well as her budget are her private information. We derive constrained-e±cient...

We consider a dynamic auction problem motivated by the traditional single-leg, multi-period revenue management problem. A seller with C units to sell faces potential buyers with unit demand who arrive and depart over the course of T time periods. The time at which a buyer arrives, her value for...

We consider a dynamic auction problem motivated by the traditional single-leg, multi-period revenue management problem. A seller with C units to sell faces potential buyers with unit demand who arrive and depart over the course of T time periods. The time at which a buyer arrives, her value for...

In online social networks, social information, i.e., content generated and shared by users (e.g., past purchases), can be a substitute for sponsored advertising, which constitutes the network’s main source of revenue. When will social information be let to spread freely over the platform? We...