Robustly Optimal Mechanisms for Selling Multiple Goods

Abstract: We study robustly optimal mechanisms for selling multiple items. The seller maximizes revenue against a worst-case distribution of a buyer's valuations within a set of distributions, called an "ambiguity" set. We identify the exact forms of robustly optimal selling mechanisms and the worst-case distributions when the ambiguity set satisfies various moment conditions on the values of subsets of goods. The analysis reveals general properties of the ambiguity set that justifies categorical bundling, which includes separate sales and pure bundling as special cases.