Abstract
Most literature on optimal auctions focuses on optimizing for a risk-neutral seller. We consider risk-averse sellers in a setting of multi-unit auctions with unit-demand bidders. We seek utility-oblivious mechanisms that do not know about the seller's utility function, while still achieving constant factor approximations to the expected utility of the optimal mechanism tailored to the utility function. Our main results are natural hedging-based mechanisms that give such utility-oblivious approximations. Along the way we show that the optimal auction theory of Myerson (1981) extends to risk-averse sellers in the single-unit case, but not in the multi-unit case.
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