market design

Robust Resource Allocation via Competitive Subsidies

A canonical setting for non-monetary online resource allocation is one where agents compete over multiple rounds for a single item per round, with i.i.d. valuations and additive utilities across rounds. With n symmetric agents, a natural benchmark …

Allocating Public Goods via Dynamic Max-Min Fairness: Long-Run Behavior and Competitive Equilibria

Dynamic max-min fair allocation (DMMF) is a simple and popular mechanism for the repeated allocation of a shared resource among competing agents: in each round, each agent can choose to request or not for the resource, which is then allocated to the …

Online Nash Social Welfare with Predictions

We consider the problem of allocating a set of divisible goods to $N$ agents in an online manner, aiming to maximize the Nash social welfare, a widely studied objective which provides a balance between fairness and efficiency. The goods arrive in a …

Threshold Tests as Quality Signals: Optimal Strategies, Equilibria, and Price of Anarchy

We study a signaling game between two firms competing to have their product chosen by a principal. The products have (real-valued) qualities, which are drawn i.i.d. from a common prior. The principal aims to choose the better of the two products, but …

The Remarkable Robustness of the Repeated Fisher Market

In many settings, resources are allocated among agents repeatedly over time without the use of monetary transfers: consider, for example, allocating server-time to company employees, rooms to students, or food among food banks. Here, the central …

Pricing and Optimization in Shared Vehicle Systems: An Approximation Framework

Optimizing shared vehicle systems (bike/scooter/car/ride-sharing) is more challenging compared to traditional resource allocation settings due to the presence of *complex network externalities* -- changes in the demand/supply at any location affect …

From Monetary to Non-Monetary Mechanism Design via Artificial Currencies

Non-monetary mechanisms for repeated allocation and decision-making are gaining widespread use in many real-world settings. Our aim in this work is to study the efficiency and incentive properties of simple mechanisms based on artificial currencies …

The Segmentation-Thickness Tradeoff in Online Marketplaces

A core tension in the operations of online marketplaces is between segmentation (wherein platforms can increase revenue by segmenting the market into ever smaller sub-markets) and thickness (wherein the size of the sub-market affects the utility …

Segmenting Two-Sided Markets

Recent years have witnessed the rise of many successful e-commerce marketplaces like the Amazon marketplace, Uber, AirBnB, and Upwork, where a central platform mediates economic transactions between buyers and sellers. A common feature of many of …

From Monetary to Non-Monetary Mechanism Design via Artificial Currencies

Non-monetary mechanisms for repeated allocation and decision-making are gaining widespread use in many real-world settings. Our aim in this work is to study the efficiency and incentive properties of simple mechanisms based on artificial currencies …