Andrew Komo

Headshot of Andrew Komo

Hi! Welcome to my website. I'm an economics PhD candidate at MIT.

I'm interested in market design and industrial organization.

The best way to reach me is by email.

Working Papers

Shill-Proof Auctions (with Scott Duke Kominers and Tim Roughgarden)

Extended Abstract to appear in EC '25

In a single-item auction, a duplicitous seller may masquerade as one or more bidders in order to manipulate the clearing price. This paper characterizes auction formats that are shill-proof: a profit-maximizing seller has no incentive to submit any shill bids. We distinguish between strong shill-proofness, in which a seller with full knowledge of bidders' valuations can never profit from shilling, and weak shill-proofness, which requires only that the expected equilibrium profit from shilling is nonpositive. The Dutch auction (with suitable reserve) is the unique optimal and strongly shill-proof auction. Moreover, the Dutch auction (with no reserve) is the unique prior-independent auction that is both efficient and weakly shill-proof. While there are a multiplicity of strategy-proof, weakly shill-proof, and optimal auctions; any optimal auction can satisfy only two properties in the set {static, strategy-proof, weakly shill-proof}.

Works in Progress

Fast Price Discovery

Allocating goods efficiently can take a long time. That time spent is costly to participants. We study mechanism design in a symmetric, IPV, heterogeneous item allocation environment where the designer's objective is a flexible function of the allocative efficiency and the time taken to complete a mechanism. Assuming that the size of action sets is sufficiently small, a mechanism offering participants a sequence of potential clearing prices is optimal. We show how activity rules, such as the Milgrom-Wilson activity rule in the FCC spectrum auctions, help speed up auctions: They prevent the formation of sub-optimal equilibria. When the number of bidders is sufficiently large and the value distribution for any bundle is sufficiently thin-tailed, a descending auction is the optimal way to allocate goods. An equivalence result between the designer's speed objective and a complexity objective based on the number of possible actions is also discussed.

Procuring Resilience: Theory and Evidence from Brazil's Electricity Market (with James Okun)

Collusion in Combinatorial Auctions (with Naveen Durvasula)