A Duality-Based Unified Approach to Bayesian Mechanism Design

In this letter we briefly survey our recent work [Cai et al. 2016]. In it, we provide a new duality theory for Bayesian mechanism design which is quite general, and applies for any objective the designer wishes to optimize, and for arbitrary agent valuations. We then apply our theory to auction design settings with many independent buyers who have independent values for many items, and are able to provide a unified proof of several recent exciting works on this front [Hart and Nisan 2012; Li and Yao 2013; Babaioff et al. 2014; Yao 2015; Chawla et al. 2007; Chawla et al. 2010; Chawla et al. 2015]. These works all show that simple mechanisms are approximately optimal in various settings. In some cases, our principled approach yields greatly improved approximation ratios as well.