22 April 2022: Freddy Reiber
Private interdependent valuations
We consider the single-item interdependent value setting, where there
is a single item sold by a monopolist, buyers, and each buyer has
a private signal describing a piece of information about the
item. Additionally, each bidder has a valuation function
mapping the (private) signals of all buyers into
a positive real number representing their value for the item. This
setting captures scenarios where the item’s information is asymmetric or
dispersed among agents, such as in competitions for oil drilling rights,
or in auctions for art pieces. Due to the increased complexity of this
model compared to the standard private values model, it is generally
assumed that each bidder’s valuation function vi is public knowledge to
the seller or all other buyers. But in many situations, the seller may
not know the bidders’ valuation functions—how a bidder aggregates
signals into a valuation is often their private information. In this
paper, we design mechanisms that guarantee approximately-optimal social
welfare while satisfying ex-post incentive compatibility and
individually rationality for the case where the valuation functions are
private to the bidders, and thus may be strategically misreported to the
seller.
(Based on a
paper from SODA 2022 by Alon Eden, Kira Goldner, and Shuran Zheng)