Collusion-resistant mechanisms for single-parameter agents
SODA '05 Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
Algorithmic Game Theory
Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Multi-parameter mechanism design and sequential posted pricing
Proceedings of the forty-second ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Revenue maximization with a single sample
Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Mechanism design via correlation gap
Proceedings of the twenty-second annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete Algorithms
Efficient mechanisms with risky participation
IJCAI'11 Proceedings of the Twenty-Second international joint conference on Artificial Intelligence - Volume Volume One
Mechanism design for a risk averse seller
WINE'12 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Internet and Network Economics
Truthfulness and stochastic dominance with monetary transfers
Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
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The existing literature on optimal auctions focuses on optimizing the expected revenue of the seller, and is appropriate for risk-neutral sellers. In this paper, we identify good mechanisms for risk-averse sellers. As is standard in the economics literature, we model the risk-aversion of a seller by endowing the seller with a monotone concave utility function. We then seek robust mechanisms that are approximately optimal for all sellers, no matter what their levels of risk-aversion are. We have two main results for multi-unit auctions with unit-demand bidders whose valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a regular distribution. First, we identify a posted-price mechanism called the Hedge mechanism, which gives a universal constant factor approximation; we also show for the unlimited supply case that this mechanism is in a sense the best possible. Second, we show that the VCG mechanism gives a universal constant factor approximation when the number of bidders is even only a small multiple of the number of items. Along the way we point out that Myerson's characterization of the optimal mechanisms fails to extend to utility-maximization for risk-averse sellers, and establish interesting properties of regular distributions and monotone hazard rate distributions