The lookahead auction: many tales about one trick (Hu Fu)

Abstract

In an EC 2001 paper, Amir Ronen designed an auction he called “Lookahead” as an approximately revenue optimal auction to sell a single item to bidders with values drawn from a correlated distribution. The elegant design and proof idea were, in a sense, a decade ahead of their time — after a period of oblivion, they have in the past five years repeatedly found applications, reincarnations and variants in a host of problems in revenue maximization, some of which bear no apparent relationship to auction design for correlated bidders.

In this talk I will present the lookahead auction, followed by a survey of its afterlife to this day, which touches on several fronts of current algorithmic research in revenue optimization and related open problems.

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