Optimal Competitive Auctions

We study the design of truthful auctions for selling identical items in unlimited supply (e.g., digital goods) to n unit demand buyers. This classic problem stands out from profit-maximizing auction design literature as it requires no probabilistic assumptions on buyers' valuations and employs the framework of competitive analysis. Our objective is to optimize the worst-case performance of an auction, measured by the ratio between a given benchmark and revenue generated by the auction. We establish a sufficient and necessary condition that characterizes competitive ratios for all monotone benchmarks. The characterization identifies the worst-case distribution of instances and reveals intrinsic relations between competitive ratios and benchmarks in the competitive analysis. With the characterization at hand, we show optimal competitive auctions for two natural benchmarks. The most well-studied benchmark $\mathcal{F}^{(2)}(\cdot)$ measures the envy-free optimal revenue where at least two buyers win. Goldberg et al. [13] showed a sequence of lower bounds on the competitive ratio for each number of buyers n. They conjectured that all these bounds are tight. We show that optimal competitive auctions match these bounds. Thus, we confirm the conjecture and settle a central open problem in the design of digital goods auctions. As one more application we examine another economically meaningful benchmark, which measures the optimal revenue across all limited-supply Vickrey auctions. We identify the optimal competitive ratios to be $(\frac{n}{n-1})^{n-1}-1$ for each number of buyers n, that is $e-1$ as $n$ approaches infinity

Core-competitive Auctions

One of the major drawbacks of the celebrated VCG auction is its low (or zero) revenue even when the agents have high value for the goods and a {\em competitive} outcome could have generated a significant revenue. A competitive outcome is one for which it is impossible for the seller and a subset of buyers to `block' the auction by defecting and negotiating an outcome with higher payoffs for themselves. This corresponds to the well-known concept of {\em core} in cooperative game theory. In particular, VCG revenue is known to be not competitive when the goods being sold have complementarities. A bottleneck here is an impossibility result showing that there is no auction that simultaneously achieves competitive prices (a core outcome) and incentive-compatibility. In this paper we try to overcome the above impossibility result by asking the following natural question: is it possible to design an incentive-compatible auction whose revenue is comparable (even if less) to a competitive outcome? Towards this, we define a notion of {\em core-competitive} auctions. We say that an incentive-compatible auction is $\alpha$-core-competitive if its revenue is at least $1/\alpha$ fraction of the minimum revenue of a core-outcome. We study the Text-and-Image setting. In this setting, there is an ad slot which can be filled with either a single image ad or $k$ text ads. We design an $O(\ln \ln k)$ core-competitive randomized auction and an $O(\sqrt{\ln(k)})$ competitive deterministic auction for the Text-and-Image setting. We also show that both factors are tight

On some methods of construction of invariant normalizations of lightlike hypersurfaces

The authors study the geometry of lightlike hypersurfaces on pseudo-Riemannian manifolds $(M, g)$ of Lorentzian signature. Such hypersurfaces are of interest in general relativity since they can be models of different types of physical horizons. For a lightlike hypersurface $V \subset (M, g)$ of general type and for some special lightlike hypersurfaces (namely, for totally umbilical and belonging to a manifold $(M, g)$ of constant curvature), in a third-order neighborhood of a point $x \in V$, the authors construct invariant normalizations intrinsically connected with the geometry of $V$ and investigate affine connections induced by these normalizations. For this construction, they used relative and absolute invariants defined by the first and second fundamental forms of $V$. The authors show that if $\dim M = 4$, their methods allow to construct three invariant normalizations and affine connections intrinsically connected with the geometry of $V$. Such a construction is given in the present paper for the first time. The authors also consider the fibration of isotropic geodesics of $V$ and investigate their singular points and singular submanifolds.Comment: LaTeX, 25 page

Conformal and Grassmann structures

The main results on the theory of conformal and almost Grassmann structures are presented. The common properties of these structures and also the differences between them are outlined. In particular, the structure groups of these structures and their differential prolongations are found. A complete system of geometric objects of the almost Grassmann structure totally defining its geometric structure is determined. The vanishing of these objects determines a locally Grassmann manifold. It is proved that the integrable almost Grassmann structures are locally Grassmann. The criteria of semiintegrability of almost Grassmann structures is proved in invariant form.Comment: LaTeX, 25 page