{"id":1417,"date":"2021-03-17T08:45:26","date_gmt":"2021-03-17T07:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/"},"modified":"2021-03-17T08:45:26","modified_gmt":"2021-03-17T07:45:26","slug":"research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design","status":"publish","type":"events","link":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/","title":{"rendered":"Research Economic Seminar: Distributionally Robust Mechanism Design"},"content":{"rendered":"<section class=\"wp-block-unilux-blocks-free-section section\"><div class=\"container xl:max-w-screen-xl\"><p>Auctions are routinely used in economic transactions that are characterized by demand uncertainty, ranging from the sale of financial instruments (e.g., U.S. Treasury bills), antiques, collectibles and commodities (e.g., radio spectra, electricity and carbon emissions) to livestock and holidays.\u00a0 We study the problem where an indivisible good is auctioned to multiple bidders, for each of whom it has a private value that is unknown to the seller and the other bidders. The agents perceive the ensemble of all bidder values as a random vector governed by an ambiguous probability distribution, which belongs to a commonly known ambiguity set. The seller aims to design a revenue maximizing mechanism that is not only immunized against the ambiguity of the bidder values but also against the uncertainty about the bidders\u2019 attitude towards ambiguity. We argue that the seller achieves this goal by maximizing the worst-case expected revenue across all value distributions in the ambiguity set and by positing that the bidders have Knightian preferences. For ambiguity sets containing all distributions supported on a hypercube, we show that the Vickrey auction is the unique mechanism that is optimal, efficient and Pareto robustly optimal. If the bidders\u2019 values are additionally known to be independent, then the revenue of the (unknown) optimal mechanism does not exceed that of a second price auction with only one additional bidder. For ambiguity sets under which the bidders\u2019 values are dependent and characterized through moment bounds, on the other hand, we provide a new class of randomized mechanisms, the highest-bidder-lotteries, whose revenues cannot be matched by any second price auction with a constant number of additional bidders. Moreover, we show that the optimal highest-bidder-lottery is a 2-approximation of the (unknown) optimal mechanism, whereas the best second price auction fails to provide any constant-factor approximation guarantee.<\/p><p><\/p><\/div><\/section>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Auctions are routinely used in economic transactions that are characterized by demand uncertainty, ranging from the sale of financial instruments (e.g., U.S. Treasury bills), antiques, collectibles and commodities (e.g., radio spectra, electricity and carbon emissions) to livestock and holidays.\u00a0 We study the problem where an indivisible good is auctioned to multiple bidders, for each of whom it has a private value that is unknown to the seller and the other bidders. The agents perceive the ensemble of all bidder values as a random vector governed by an ambiguous probability distribution, which belongs to a commonly known ambiguity set. The seller aims to design a revenue maximizing mechanism that is not only immunized against the ambiguity of the bidder values but also against the uncertainty about the bidders\u2019 attitude towards ambiguity. We argue that the seller achieves this goal by maximizing the worst-case expected revenue across all value distributions in the ambiguity set and by positing that the bidders have Knightian preferences. For ambiguity sets containing all distributions supported on a hypercube, we show that the Vickrey auction is the unique mechanism that is optimal, efficient and Pareto robustly optimal. If the bidders\u2019 values are additionally known to be independent, then the revenue of the (unknown) optimal mechanism does not exceed that of a second price auction with only one additional bidder. For ambiguity sets under which the bidders\u2019 values are dependent and characterized through moment bounds, on the other hand, we provide a new class of randomized mechanisms, the highest-bidder-lotteries, whose revenues cannot be matched by any second price auction with a constant number of additional bidders. Moreover, we show that the optimal highest-bidder-lottery is a 2-approximation of the (unknown) optimal mechanism, whereas the best second price auction fails to provide any constant-factor approximation guarantee.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1418,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"featured_image_focal_point":[],"show_featured_caption":false,"ulux_newsletter_groups":"","uluxPostTitle":"","uluxPrePostTitle":"","_trash_the_other_posts":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"event_start_date":"2021-03-24 13:00:00","event_end_date":"2021-03-24 14:00:00","event_speaker_name":"\u00c7a\u011f\u0131l Ko\u00e7yi\u011fit, Department of Economics and Management, Luxembourg Centre for Logistics,   Universit\u00e9 du Luxembourg","event_speaker_link":"","event_is_online":false,"event_location":"Participation by invitation\r\n\r\nOnline via Webex","event_street":"","event_location_link":"","event_zip_code":"","event_city":"","event_country":"LU"},"events-topic":[298],"events-type":[],"organisation":[137],"authorship":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v22.3 (Yoast SEO v22.3) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Research Economic Seminar: Distributionally Robust Mechanism Design - FDEF I Uni.lu<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Auctions are routinely used in economic transactions that are characterized by demand uncertainty, ranging from the sale of financial instruments (e.g., U.S. Treasury bills), antiques, collectibles and commodities (e.g., radio spectra, electricity and carbon emissions) to livestock and holidays.\u00a0 We study the problem where an indivisible good is auctioned to multiple bidders, for each of whom it has a private value that is unknown to the seller and the other bidders. The agents perceive the ensemble of all bidder values as a random vector governed by an ambiguous probability distribution, which belongs to a commonly known ambiguity set. The seller aims to design a revenue maximizing mechanism that is not only immunized against the ambiguity of the bidder values but also against the uncertainty about the bidders\u2019 attitude towards ambiguity. We argue that the seller achieves this goal by maximizing the worst-case expected revenue across all value distributions in the ambiguity set and by positing that the bidders have Knightian preferences. For ambiguity sets containing all distributions supported on a hypercube, we show that the Vickrey auction is the unique mechanism that is optimal, efficient and Pareto robustly optimal. If the bidders\u2019 values are additionally known to be independent, then the revenue of the (unknown) optimal mechanism does not exceed that of a second price auction with only one additional bidder. For ambiguity sets under which the bidders\u2019 values are dependent and characterized through moment bounds, on the other hand, we provide a new class of randomized mechanisms, the highest-bidder-lotteries, whose revenues cannot be matched by any second price auction with a constant number of additional bidders. Moreover, we show that the optimal highest-bidder-lottery is a 2-approximation of the (unknown) optimal mechanism, whereas the best second price auction fails to provide any constant-factor approximation guarantee.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"fr_FR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Research Economic Seminar: Distributionally Robust Mechanism Design\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Auctions are routinely used in economic transactions that are characterized by demand uncertainty, ranging from the sale of financial instruments (e.g., U.S. Treasury bills), antiques, collectibles and commodities (e.g., radio spectra, electricity and carbon emissions) to livestock and holidays.\u00a0 We study the problem where an indivisible good is auctioned to multiple bidders, for each of whom it has a private value that is unknown to the seller and the other bidders. The agents perceive the ensemble of all bidder values as a random vector governed by an ambiguous probability distribution, which belongs to a commonly known ambiguity set. The seller aims to design a revenue maximizing mechanism that is not only immunized against the ambiguity of the bidder values but also against the uncertainty about the bidders\u2019 attitude towards ambiguity. We argue that the seller achieves this goal by maximizing the worst-case expected revenue across all value distributions in the ambiguity set and by positing that the bidders have Knightian preferences. For ambiguity sets containing all distributions supported on a hypercube, we show that the Vickrey auction is the unique mechanism that is optimal, efficient and Pareto robustly optimal. If the bidders\u2019 values are additionally known to be independent, then the revenue of the (unknown) optimal mechanism does not exceed that of a second price auction with only one additional bidder. For ambiguity sets under which the bidders\u2019 values are dependent and characterized through moment bounds, on the other hand, we provide a new class of randomized mechanisms, the highest-bidder-lotteries, whose revenues cannot be matched by any second price auction with a constant number of additional bidders. Moreover, we show that the optimal highest-bidder-lottery is a 2-approximation of the (unknown) optimal mechanism, whereas the best second price auction fails to provide any constant-factor approximation guarantee.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"FDEF FR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/uni.FDEF.lu\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2026\/03\/03111953\/FDEF_SM-Profile_1600x1600px-scaled.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"2560\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Dur\u00e9e de lecture estim\u00e9e\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"1 minute\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/\",\"name\":\"Research Economic Seminar: Distributionally Robust Mechanism Design - FDEF I Uni.lu\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2021\/03\/research_economic_seminar_distributionally_robust_mechanism_design.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2021-03-17T07:45:26+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2021-03-17T07:45:26+00:00\",\"description\":\"Auctions are routinely used in economic transactions that are characterized by demand uncertainty, ranging from the sale of financial instruments (e.g., U.S. Treasury bills), antiques, collectibles and commodities (e.g., radio spectra, electricity and carbon emissions) to livestock and holidays.\u00a0 We study the problem where an indivisible good is auctioned to multiple bidders, for each of whom it has a private value that is unknown to the seller and the other bidders. The agents perceive the ensemble of all bidder values as a random vector governed by an ambiguous probability distribution, which belongs to a commonly known ambiguity set. The seller aims to design a revenue maximizing mechanism that is not only immunized against the ambiguity of the bidder values but also against the uncertainty about the bidders\u2019 attitude towards ambiguity. We argue that the seller achieves this goal by maximizing the worst-case expected revenue across all value distributions in the ambiguity set and by positing that the bidders have Knightian preferences. For ambiguity sets containing all distributions supported on a hypercube, we show that the Vickrey auction is the unique mechanism that is optimal, efficient and Pareto robustly optimal. If the bidders\u2019 values are additionally known to be independent, then the revenue of the (unknown) optimal mechanism does not exceed that of a second price auction with only one additional bidder. For ambiguity sets under which the bidders\u2019 values are dependent and characterized through moment bounds, on the other hand, we provide a new class of randomized mechanisms, the highest-bidder-lotteries, whose revenues cannot be matched by any second price auction with a constant number of additional bidders. 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The agents perceive the ensemble of all bidder values as a random vector governed by an ambiguous probability distribution, which belongs to a commonly known ambiguity set. The seller aims to design a revenue maximizing mechanism that is not only immunized against the ambiguity of the bidder values but also against the uncertainty about the bidders\u2019 attitude towards ambiguity. We argue that the seller achieves this goal by maximizing the worst-case expected revenue across all value distributions in the ambiguity set and by positing that the bidders have Knightian preferences. For ambiguity sets containing all distributions supported on a hypercube, we show that the Vickrey auction is the unique mechanism that is optimal, efficient and Pareto robustly optimal. If the bidders\u2019 values are additionally known to be independent, then the revenue of the (unknown) optimal mechanism does not exceed that of a second price auction with only one additional bidder. For ambiguity sets under which the bidders\u2019 values are dependent and characterized through moment bounds, on the other hand, we provide a new class of randomized mechanisms, the highest-bidder-lotteries, whose revenues cannot be matched by any second price auction with a constant number of additional bidders. Moreover, we show that the optimal highest-bidder-lottery is a 2-approximation of the (unknown) optimal mechanism, whereas the best second price auction fails to provide any constant-factor approximation guarantee.","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/","og_locale":"fr_FR","og_type":"article","og_title":"Research Economic Seminar: Distributionally Robust Mechanism Design","og_description":"Auctions are routinely used in economic transactions that are characterized by demand uncertainty, ranging from the sale of financial instruments (e.g., U.S. Treasury bills), antiques, collectibles and commodities (e.g., radio spectra, electricity and carbon emissions) to livestock and holidays.\u00a0 We study the problem where an indivisible good is auctioned to multiple bidders, for each of whom it has a private value that is unknown to the seller and the other bidders. The agents perceive the ensemble of all bidder values as a random vector governed by an ambiguous probability distribution, which belongs to a commonly known ambiguity set. The seller aims to design a revenue maximizing mechanism that is not only immunized against the ambiguity of the bidder values but also against the uncertainty about the bidders\u2019 attitude towards ambiguity. We argue that the seller achieves this goal by maximizing the worst-case expected revenue across all value distributions in the ambiguity set and by positing that the bidders have Knightian preferences. For ambiguity sets containing all distributions supported on a hypercube, we show that the Vickrey auction is the unique mechanism that is optimal, efficient and Pareto robustly optimal. If the bidders\u2019 values are additionally known to be independent, then the revenue of the (unknown) optimal mechanism does not exceed that of a second price auction with only one additional bidder. For ambiguity sets under which the bidders\u2019 values are dependent and characterized through moment bounds, on the other hand, we provide a new class of randomized mechanisms, the highest-bidder-lotteries, whose revenues cannot be matched by any second price auction with a constant number of additional bidders. 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The agents perceive the ensemble of all bidder values as a random vector governed by an ambiguous probability distribution, which belongs to a commonly known ambiguity set. The seller aims to design a revenue maximizing mechanism that is not only immunized against the ambiguity of the bidder values but also against the uncertainty about the bidders\u2019 attitude towards ambiguity. We argue that the seller achieves this goal by maximizing the worst-case expected revenue across all value distributions in the ambiguity set and by positing that the bidders have Knightian preferences. For ambiguity sets containing all distributions supported on a hypercube, we show that the Vickrey auction is the unique mechanism that is optimal, efficient and Pareto robustly optimal. If the bidders\u2019 values are additionally known to be independent, then the revenue of the (unknown) optimal mechanism does not exceed that of a second price auction with only one additional bidder. For ambiguity sets under which the bidders\u2019 values are dependent and characterized through moment bounds, on the other hand, we provide a new class of randomized mechanisms, the highest-bidder-lotteries, whose revenues cannot be matched by any second price auction with a constant number of additional bidders. Moreover, we show that the optimal highest-bidder-lottery is a 2-approximation of the (unknown) optimal mechanism, whereas the best second price auction fails to provide any constant-factor approximation guarantee.","breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"fr-FR","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"fr-FR","@id":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/#primaryimage","url":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2021\/03\/research_economic_seminar_distributionally_robust_mechanism_design.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2021\/03\/research_economic_seminar_distributionally_robust_mechanism_design.jpg","width":800,"height":600},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/research-economic-seminar-distributionally-robust-mechanism-design\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fr"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Facult\u00e9 de Droit, d\u2019\u00c9conomie et de Finance","item":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Events","item":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/events\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":4,"name":"Research Economic Seminar: Distributionally Robust Mechanism Design"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/","name":"FDEF","description":"Facult\u00e9 de Droit, d\u2019\u00c9conomie et de Finance I Uni.lu","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/#organization"},"alternateName":"Facult\u00e9 de Droit, d\u2019\u00c9conomie et de Finance I Universit\u00e9 du Luxembourg","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"fr-FR"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/#organization","name":"FDEF - Universit\u00e9 du Luxembourg I Uni.lu","alternateName":"Facult\u00e9 de Droit, d\u2019\u00c9conomie et de Finance","url":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"fr-FR","@id":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2026\/03\/03111953\/FDEF_SM-Profile_1600x1600px-scaled.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2026\/03\/03111953\/FDEF_SM-Profile_1600x1600px-scaled.jpg","width":2560,"height":2560,"caption":"FDEF - Universit\u00e9 du Luxembourg I Uni.lu"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/uni.FDEF.lu","https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/showcase\/fdef-uni-lu\/"]}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events\/1417"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/events"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events\/1417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"events-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events-topic?post=1417"},{"taxonomy":"events-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/events-type?post=1417"},{"taxonomy":"organisation","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.uni.lu\/fdef-fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/organisation?post=1417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}