Prior-independent auctions for risk-averse agents

Authors:
Hu Fu;Jason Hartline;Darrell Hoy
Affiliations:
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA;Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the fourteenth ACM conference on Electronic commerce
Year:
2013

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Abstract

We study simple and approximately optimal auctions for agents with a particular form of risk-averse preferences. We show that, for symmetric agents, the optimal revenue (given a prior distribution over the agent preferences) can be approximated by the first-price auction (which is prior independent), and, for asymmetric agents, the optimal revenue can be approximated by an auction with simple form. These results are based on two technical methods. The first is for upper-bounding the revenue from a risk-averse agent. The second gives a payment identity for mechanisms with pay-your-bid semantics.