Related papers: Explicit shading strategies for repeated truthful …
Simultaneous ascending auctions present agents with the exposure problem: bidding to acquire a bundle risks the possibility of obtaining an undesired subset of the goods. Auction theory provides little guidance for dealing with this…
The intuition that profit is optimized by maximizing marginal revenue is a guiding principle in microeconomics. In the classical auction theory for agents with linear utility and single-dimensional preferences, Bulow and Roberts (1989) show…
With the advent and increasing consolidation of e-commerce, digital advertising has very recently replaced traditional advertising as the main marketing force in the economy. In the past four years, a particularly important development in…
We consider the question of whether collusion among bidders (a "bidding ring") can be supported in equilibrium of unrepeated first-price auctions. Unlike previous work on the topic such as that by McAfee and McMillan [1992] and Marshall and…
The internet advertising market is a multi-billion dollar industry, in which advertisers buy thousands of ad placements every day by repeatedly participating in auctions. An important and ubiquitous feature of these auctions is the presence…
In programmatic advertising, ad slots are usually sold using second-price (SP) auctions in real-time. The highest bidding advertiser wins but pays only the second-highest bid (known as the winning price). In SP, for a single item, the…
In this work we consider selling items using a sequential first price auction mechanism. We generalize the assumption of conservative bidding to extensive form games (henceforth optimistic conservative bidding), and show that for both…
While auction theory views bids and valuations as continuous variables, real-world auctions are necessarily discrete. In this paper, we use a combination of analytical and computational methods to investigate whether incorporating…
As computational agents are developed for increasingly complicated e-commerce applications, the complexity of the decisions they face demands advances in artificial intelligence techniques. For example, an agent representing a seller in an…
We study envy-free pricing mechanisms in matching markets with $m$ items and $n$ budget constrained buyers. Each buyer is interested in a subset of the items on sale, and she appraises at some single-value every item in her preference-set.…
In this paper we define a new auction, called the Draw auction. It is based on the implementation of a draw when a minimum price of sale is not reached. We find that a Bayesian Nash equilibrium is reached in the Draw auction when each…
The display advertising industry has recently transitioned from second- to first-price auctions as its primary mechanism for ad allocation and pricing. In light of this, publishers need to re-evaluate and optimize their auction parameters,…
We study simple and approximately optimal auctions for agents with a particular form of risk-averse preferences. We show that, for symmetric agents, the optimal revenue (given a prior distribution over the agent preferences) can be…
We study the problem of characterizing revenue optimal auctions for single-minded buyers. Each buyer is interested only in a specific bundle of items and has a value for the same. Both his bundle and its value are his private information.…
Consider Myerson's optimal auction with respect to an inaccurate prior, e.g., estimated from data, which is an underestimation of the true value distribution. Can the auctioneer expect getting at least the optimal revenue w.r.t. the…
A single unit of a good is sold to one of two bidders. Each bidder has either a high prior valuation or a low prior valuation for the good. Their prior valuations are independently and identically distributed. Each bidder may observe an…
In non-truthful auctions such as first-price and all-pay auctions, the independent strategic behaviors of bidders, with the corresponding Bayes-Nash equilibrium notion, are notoriously difficult to characterize and can cause undesirable…
One method to offer some bidders a discount in a first-price auction is to augment their bids when selecting a winner but only charge them their original bids should they win. Another method is to use their original bids to select a winner,…
Myerson derived a simple and elegant solution to the single-parameter revenue-maximization problem in his seminal work on optimal auction design assuming the usual model of quasi-linear utilities. In this paper, we consider a slight…
We consider an online ad network problem in which an ad exchange auctions ad slots and intermediaries called demand side platforms (DSPs) buy these ad slots for their clients (advertisers). An intermediary represents multiple advertisers.…