Related papers: Analyses of Cardinal Auctions
The Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism is infamously revenue non-monotone in combinatorial auctions. I.e., when a buyer increases their value for a bundle of items, the total auction revenue may decrease. Combinatorial auctions exhibit…
This paper studies equilibrium quality of semi-separable position auctions (known as the Ad Types setting) with greedy or optimal allocation combined with generalized second-price (GSP) or Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) pricing. We make three…
Standard ad auction formats do not immediately extend to settings where multiple size configurations and layouts are available to advertisers. In these settings, the sale of web advertising space increasingly resembles a combinatorial…
We quantify the value of the monopoly's bargaining power in terms of competition complexity--that is, the number of additional bidders the monopoly must attract in simple auctions to match the expected revenue of the optimal mechanisms…
The generalized second price (GSP) auction has served as the core selling mechanism for sponsored search ads for over a decade. However, recent trends expanding the set of allowed ad formats---to include a variety of sizes, decorations, and…
In recent years, the growing adoption of autobidding has motivated the study of auction design with value-maximizing auto-bidders. It is known that under mild assumptions, uniform bid-scaling is an optimal bidding strategy in truthful…
The classic result of Bulow and Klemperer (1996) shows that in multi-unit auctions with $m$ units and $n\geq m$ buyers whose values are sampled i.i.d. from a regular distribution, the revenue of the VCG auction with $m$ additional buyers is…
The design of the best economic mechanism for Sponsored Search Auctions (SSAs) is a central task in computational mechanism design/game theory. Two open questions concern the adoption of user models more accurate than that one currently…
This paper investigates reverse auctions that involve continuous values of different types of goods, general nonconvex constraints, and second stage costs. We seek to design the payment rules and conditions under which coalitions of…
We study the social efficiency of several well-known mechanisms for the allocation of a set of available (advertising) positions to a set of competing budget-constrained users (advertisers). Specifically, we focus on the Generalized Second…
We study the price of anarchy of the generalized second-price auction where bidders are value maximizers (i.e., autobidders). We show that in general the price of anarchy can be as bad as $0$. For comparison, the price of anarchy of running…
Building on the linear programming approach to competitive equilibrium pricing, we develop a general method for constructing iterative auctions that achieve Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) outcomes. We show how to transform a linear program…
Internet ad auctions have evolved from a few lines of text to richer informational layouts that include images, sitelinks, videos, etc. Ads in these new formats occupy varying amounts of space, and an advertiser can provide multiple…
In sponsored search, a number of advertising slots is available on a search results page, and have to be allocated among a set of advertisers competing to display an ad on the page. This gives rise to a bipartite matching market that is…
We study the efficiency of simple combinatorial auctions for the allocation of a set of items to a set of agents, with private subadditive valuation functions and budget constraints. The class we consider includes all auctions that allocate…
Consider the problem of allocating goods to buyers through an auction. An auction is efficient if the resulting allocation maximizes total welfare, conditional on the information available. If buyers have private values, the…
Under the incentive-compatible Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism, coalitions of participants can influence the auction outcome to obtain higher collective profit. These manipulations were proven to be eliminated if and only if the market…
Bulow and Klemperer's well-known result states that, in a single-item auction where the $n$ bidders' values are independently and identically drawn from a regular distribution, the Vickrey auction with one additional bidder (a duplicate)…
Many popular search engines run an auction to determine the placement of advertisements next to search results. Current auctions at Google and Yahoo! let advertisers specify a single amount as their bid in the auction. This bid is…
In the standard single-dimensional model of position auctions, bidders agree on the relative values of the positions and each of them submits a single bid that is interpreted in terms of these values. Motivated by current practice in…