Vickrey Auctions for Irregular Distributions

The classic result of Bulow and Klemperer \cite{BK96} says that in a single-item auction recruiting one more bidder and running the Vickrey auction achieves a higher revenue than the optimal auction's revenue on the original set of bidders, when values are drawn i.i.d. from a regular distribution. We give a version of Bulow and Klemperer's result in settings where bidders' values are drawn from non-i.i.d. irregular distributions. We do this by modeling irregular distributions as some convex combination of regular distributions. The regular distributions that constitute the irregular distribution correspond to different population groups in the bidder population. Drawing a bidder from this collection of population groups is equivalent to drawing from some convex combination of these regular distributions. We show that recruiting one extra bidder from each underlying population group and running the Vickrey auction gives at least half of the optimal auction's revenue on the original set of bidders

The derived category of quasi-coherent sheaves and axiomatic stable homotopy

We prove in this paper that for a quasi-compact and semi-separated (non necessarily noetherian) scheme X, the derived category of quasi-coherent sheaves over X, D(A_qc(X)), is a stable homotopy category in the sense of Hovey, Palmieri and Strickland, answering a question posed by Strickland. Moreover we show that it is unital and algebraic. We also prove that for a noetherian semi-separated formal scheme X, its derived category of sheaves of modules with quasi-coherent torsion homologies D_qct(X) is a stable homotopy category. It is algebraic but if the formal scheme is not a usual scheme, it is not unital, therefore its abstract nature differs essentially from that of the derived category of a usual scheme.Comment: v2: 31 pages, some improvements in exposition; v3 updated bibliography, to appear Adv. Mat

Simple, optimal and efficient auctions

Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop, WINE 2011, Singapore, December 11-14, 2011.We study the extent to which simple auctions can simultaneously achieve good revenue and efficiency guarantees in single-item settings. Motivated by the optimality of the second price auction with monopoly reserves when the bidders’ values are drawn i.i.d. from regular distributions [12], and its approximate optimality when they are drawn from independent regular distributions [11], we focus our attention to the second price auction with general (not necessarily monopoly) reserve prices, arguably one of the simplest and most intuitive auction formats. As our main result, we show that for a carefully chosen set of reserve prices this auction guarantees at least 20% of both the optimal welfare and the optimal revenue, when the bidders’ values are distributed according to independent, not necessarily identical, regular distributions. We also prove a similar guarantee, when the values are drawn i.i.d. from a—possibly irregular—distribution.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (award CCF-0953960)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (CCF-1101491

Gorenstein homological algebra and universal coefficient theorems

We study criteria for a ring—or more generally, for a small category—to be Gorenstein and for a module over it to be of finite projective dimension. The goal is to unify the universal coefficient theorems found in the literature and to develop machinery for proving new ones. Among the universal coefficient theorems covered by our methods we find, besides all the classic examples, several exotic examples arising from the KK-theory of C*-algebras and also Neeman’s Brown–Adams representability theorem for compactly generated categories

On the existence of a compact generator on the derived category of a noetherian formal scheme

In this paper, we prove that for a noetherian formal scheme X, its derived category of sheaves of modules with quasi-coherent torsion homologies D_qct(X) is generated by a single compact object. In an appendix we prove that the category of compact objects in D_qct(X) is skeletally small.Comment: 13 page