Optimal Auctions with Restricted Allocations

Abstract

We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove a strong duality result, extending a result due to Daskalakis et al. [2015], that guarantees the existence of a certificate of optimality for optimal restricted mechanisms. As a corollary of our result, we provide a new characterization of the set of allocations that the optimal mechanism may actually use. To illustrate our result we find and certify optimal mechanisms for four settings where previous frameworks do not apply, and provide new economic intuition about some of the tools that have previously been used to find optimal mechanisms.