Revenue Guarantees in Autobidding Platforms
Abstract
Motivated by autobidding systems in online advertising, we study revenue maximization in markets with divisible goods and budget-constrained buyers with linear valuations. Our aim is to compute a single price for each good and an allocation that maximizes total revenue. We show that the First-Price Pacing Equilibrium (FPPE) guarantees at least half of the optimal revenue, even when compared to the maximal revenue of buyer-specific prices. This guarantee is particularly striking in light of our hardness result: we prove that revenue maximization under individual rationality and single-price-per-good constraints is APX-hard. We further extend our analysis in two directions: first, we introduce an online analogue of FPPE and show that it achieves a constant-factor revenue guarantee, specifically a -approximation; second, we consider buyers with concave valuation functions, characterizing an FPPE-type outcome as the solution to an Eisenberg-Gale-style convex program and showing that the revenue approximation degrades gracefully with the degree of nonlinearity of the valuations.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.14815,
title = {Revenue Guarantees in Autobidding Platforms},
author = {Ioannis Caragiannis and Anders Bo Ipsen and Stratis Skoulakis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.14815},
year = {2026}
}