Sequential Posted Price Mechanisms
In this talk I will give an introduction to sequential posted price mechanims (SPPMs), and cover some of my own work in this area as well. SPPMs are a type of auction in which there is a single good for sale, and the auctioneer iteratively offers a take-it-or-leave-it price to each of the participants of the auction at which a buyer can buy an item. The computer science and economics literature on this subject is mostly concerned with the revenue and social welfare that sequential posted price auctions are able to generate.
In the first part of the talk, I will give an overview of the existing literature on SPPMs and I will discuss why it is important to study SPPMs and how they are positioned into the general mechanism design and auction theory research fields. In the second part, I will talk about some recent papers I have co-authored on this subject:
In the first paper we analyze SPPMs, extended to a setting where the bidders' valuations are correlated with each other. Joint work with M. Adamczyk, A. Borodin, D. Ferraioli, and S. Leonardi.
The second paper introduces SPPMs for two-sided markets (i.e., with multiple buyers and sellers) in order to obtain O(1)-approximations to the expected optimal social welfare of the market. Joint work with R. Colini-Baldeschi, S. Leonardi, and S. Turchetta.
Bio: Bart de Keijzer is a postdoctoral researcher at Sapienza University of Rome. He obtained his Ph.D. from CWI/VU University in 2014. His research interests are in algorithms and computational complexity, and its application to economics.