Full surplus extraction from samples

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Fu, Hu; Haghpanah, Nima; Hartline, Jason; Kleinberg, Robert
• 署名单位: University of British Columbia; Pennsylvania Commonwealth System of Higher Education (PCSHE); Pennsylvania State University; Pennsylvania State University - University Park; Northwestern University; Cornell University
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2021.105230
• 发表日期: 2021
• 关键词: Auction design; Unknown distributions; samples

摘要

We study whether an auctioneer who has only partial knowledge of the distribution of buyers' valuations can extract the full surplus. There is a finite number of possible distributions, and the auctioneer has access to a finite number of samples (independent draws) from the true distribution. Full surplus extraction is possible if the number of samples is at least the difference between the number of distributions and the dimension of the linear space they span, plus one. This bound is tight. The mechanism that extracts the full surplus uses the samples to construct contingent payments, and not for statistical inference. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.