Title: Optimal Auction Design for Dynamic Stochastic Environments: Myerson Meets Naor
Abstract: The allocation of goods and services often involves both stochastic supply and demand. Motivated by applications such as cloud computing, gig platforms, and blockchain auctions, we study the optimal design of allocation mechanisms in an environment where buyers with private valuations and waiting costs arrive stochastically and are served by goods that arrive stochastically. We derive the dynamic screening mechanism that optimally manages buyer participation and competition through a reserve price that increases with queue length and an auction to allocate the goods. The optimal mechanism balances efficiency and revenue generation, offering insights into the design of auctions in various settings where supply and demand fluctuate over time.
Bio: Yeon-Koo Che is Kelvin J. Lancaster Professor of Economic Theory at Columbia University. His early work contributes to the theory of mechanism and auction design: scoring-rule auctions, auctions with budget constraints, collusion-proof mechanism design, research contest, the incomplete contract paradigm for organization theory, and the matching theory in the context of college and school choice. His current research projects explore the implications of data-driven economic decision-making and resource allocation for welfare and distributional consequences.
He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society (elected 2009), a Fellow of Economic Theory (elected 2014) for the Society of Advancement of Economic Theory, and a Fellow of the Game Theory Society (elected 2023). He served as a member of the Council of Game Theory Society (elected 2017) and of the Asian Regional Council of Econometric Society (elected 2016). He served as Executive Director of the Program for Economic Research (2015-18). He was editor of the Journal of Industrial Economics, and associate editor of Econometrica, and is currently serving as advisory editor of Games and Economic Behavior. He was the inaugural recipient in 2008 of the Cho Rakkyo Prize and the KAEA-MK Prize in 2009. He has given numerous Keynote addresses, including the Jacob Marschak Lecture at the Econometric Society meeting in Sydney (2016), the Asian Meeting of Econometric Society (2018), and the Latin American Meeting of Econometric Society (2018). He has received nine National Science Foundation grants spanning over 20 years. He received a Ph.D. in Economics at the Stanford University. He was a Professor at the University of Wisconsin before joining Columbia University as a Professor of Economics in 2005.
