# (Almost) Efficient Mechanisms for Bilateral Trading

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.04876 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.04876/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Bilateral Trade: A Regret Minimization Perspective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12974/) (2021)
- [A Regret Analysis of Bilateral Trade](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.08754/) (2021)
- [An α-regret analysis of Adversarial Bilateral Trade](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06846/) (2022)
- [Nearly Tight Regret Bounds for Profit Maximization in Bilateral Trade](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22563/) (2025)
- [Learning to Maximize Gains From Trade in Small Markets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11596/) (2024)
- [Contextual Online Bilateral Trade](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12903/) (2026)
- [Bilateral Trade Under Heavy-Tailed Valuations: Minimax Regret without a Variance Bound](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06851/) (2026)
- [A New Lower Bound for the Random Offerer Mechanism in Bilateral Trade using AI-Guided Evolutionary Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08679/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the bilateral trade problem: one seller, one buyer and a single, indivisible item for sale. It is well known that there is no fully-efficient and incentive compatible mechanism for this problem that maintains a balanced budget. We design simple and robust mechanisms that obtain approximate efficiency with these properties. We show that even minimal use of statistical data can yield good approximation results. Finally, we demonstrate how a mechanism for this simple bilateral-trade problem can be used as a "black-box" for constructing mechanisms in more general environments.