Related papers: Detecting Multiple Seller Collusive Shill Bidding
Recent scholarly work has extensively examined the phenomenon of algorithmic collusion driven by AI-enabled pricing algorithms. However, online platforms commonly deploy recommender systems that influence how consumers discover and purchase…
Combinatorial auctions where agents can bid on bundles of items are desirable because they allow the agents to express complementarity and substitutability between the items. However, expressing one's preferences can require bidding on all…
While the auto-bidding literature predominantly considers independent bidding, we investigate the coordination problem among multiple auto-bidders in online advertising platforms. Two motivating scenarios are: collaborative bidding among…
Competing firms can increase profits by setting prices collectively, imposing significant costs on consumers. Such groups of firms are known as cartels and because this behavior is illegal, their operations are secretive and difficult to…
Sellers often prescreen potential bidders, restricting participation to a select group of capable participants. Recent advances in machine learning and generative AI make this strategy increasingly viable by enabling the cost-effective…
Collusion in market pricing is a concept associated with human actions to raise market prices through artificially limited supply. Recently, the idea of algorithmic collusion was put forward, where the human action in the pricing process is…
Online auctions are fast gaining popularity in today's electronic commerce. Relative to offline auctions, there is a greater degree of multiple bidding and late bidding in online auctions, an empirical finding by some recent research. These…
Collusion among bidders adversely affects procurement cost and in some cases efficiency, and it seems collusion is more prevalent that we would like. Statistical methods of detecting collusion just using bid data, in a hope to deter future…
We consider an environment where sellers compete over buyers. All sellers are a-priori identical and strategically signal buyers about the product they sell. In a setting motivated by on-line advertising in display ad exchanges, where firms…
We study a class of iterative combinatorial auctions which can be viewed as subgradient descent methods for the problem of pricing bundles to balance supply and demand. We provide concrete convergence rates for auctions in this class,…
In online combinatorial allocations/auctions, n bidders sequentially arrive, each with a combinatorial valuation (such as submodular/XOS) over subsets of m indivisible items. The aim is to immediately allocate a subset of the remaining…
We consider repeated multi-unit auctions with uniform pricing, which are widely used in practice for allocating goods such as carbon licenses. In each round, $K$ identical units of a good are sold to a group of buyers that have valuations…
Iterative combinatorial auctions are widely used in high stakes settings such as spectrum auctions. Such auctions can be hard to analyze, making it difficult for bidders to determine how to behave and for designers to optimize auction rules…
The plethora of comparison shopping agents (CSAs) in today's markets enables buyers to query more than a single CSA when shopping, and an inter-CSAs competition naturally arises. We suggest a new approach, termed "selective price…
Consider sellers in a competitive market that use algorithms to adapt their prices from data that they collect. In such a context it is plausible that algorithms could arrive at prices that are higher than the competitive prices and this…
We propose a new method for flagging bid rigging, which is particularly useful for detecting incomplete bid-rigging cartels. Our approach combines screens, i.e. statistics derived from the distribution of bids in a tender, with machine…
This paper studies inference in first-price and second-price sealed-bid auctions with many bidders, using an asymptotic framework where the number of bidders increases while the number of auctions remains fixed. Our approach enables…
Considering the premise that the number of products offered grow in an exponential fashion and the amount of data that a user can assimilate before making a decision is relatively small, recommender systems help in categorizing content…
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…
Budgets play a significant role in real-world sequential auction markets such as those implemented by internet companies. To maximize the value provided to auction participants, spending is smoothed across auctions so budgets are used for…