Related papers: Competitive analysis via benchmark decomposition
We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a…
In the design and analysis of revenue-maximizing auctions, auction performance is typically measured with respect to a prior distribution over inputs. The most obvious source for such a distribution is past data. The goal is to understand…
Notifications are important for the user experience in mobile apps and can influence their engagement. However, too many notifications can be disruptive for users. A typical mobile app usually has several types of notification, managed by…
For many application areas A/B testing, which partitions users of a system into an A (control) and B (treatment) group to experiment between several application designs, enables Internet companies to optimize their services to the…
Auction-based recommender systems are prevalent in online advertising platforms, but they are typically optimized to allocate recommendation slots based on immediate expected return metrics, neglecting the downstream effects of…
Market-based mechanisms such as auctions are being studied as an appropriate means for resource allocation in distributed and mulitagent decision problems. When agents value resources in combination rather than in isolation, they must often…
We study online combinatorial auctions with production costs proposed by Blum et al. using the online primal dual framework. In this model, buyers arrive online, and the seller can produce multiple copies of each item subject to a…
Edge computing as a promising technology provides lower latency, more efficient transmission, and faster speed of data processing since the edge servers are closer to the user devices. Each edge server with limited resources can offload…
In this paper, we examine the price dynamics of on-line art auctions of modern Indian art using functional data analysis. The purpose here is not just to understand what determines the final prices of art objects, but also the price…
The Competition Complexity of an auction setting refers to the number of additional bidders necessary in order for the (deterministic, prior-independent, dominant strategy truthful) Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism to achieve greater revenue…
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
Finding optimal solutions for multi-unit combinatorial auctions is a hard problem and finding approximations to the optimal solution is also hard. We investigate the use of Branch-and-Bound techniques: they require both a way to bound from…
Online A/B testing, the gold standard for evaluating new advertising policies, consumes substantial engineering resources and risks significant revenue loss from deploying underperforming variations. This motivates the use of Off-Policy…
Recent empirical work demonstrates that online advertisement can exhibit bias in the delivery of ads across users even when all advertisers bid in a non-discriminatory manner. We study the design of ad auctions that, given fair bids, are…
The Competition Complexity of an auction measures how much competition is needed for the revenue of a simple auction to surpass the optimal revenue. A classic result from auction theory by Bulow and Klemperer [9], states that the…
Spectrum auctions are the primary mechanism through which governments allocate scarce radio frequencies, with outcomes that shape competition, coverage, and innovation in telecommunications markets. While traditional models of spectrum…
We perform a simulation-based analysis of keyword auctions modeled as one-shot games of incomplete information to study a series of mechanism design questions. Our first question addresses the degree to which incentive compatibility fails…
We study the design of prior-independent auctions in a setting with heterogeneous bidders. In particular, we consider the setting of selling to $n$ bidders whose values are drawn from $n$ independent but not necessarily identical…
We introduce several new estimation methods that leverage shape constraints in auction models to estimate various objects of interest, including the distribution of a bidder's valuations, the bidder's ex ante expected surplus, and the…
This paper develops a theory of competitive equilibrium with indivisible goods based entirely on economic conditions on demand. The key idea is to analyze complementarity and substitutability between bundles of goods, rather than merely…