Related papers: Credibility in Second-Price Auctions: An Experimen…
We provide efficient estimation methods for first- and second-price auctions under independent (asymmetric) private values and partial observability. Given a finite set of observations, each comprising the identity of the winner and the…
Motivated by online advertising auctions, we study auction design in repeated auctions played by simple Artificial Intelligence algorithms (Q-learning). We find that first-price auctions with no additional feedback lead to tacit-collusive…
Shilling is the use of artificial bids to make competition appear stronger and push prices upward. We study repeated first-price auctions in which shilling affects feedback but not allocation: the learner wins or loses against the real…
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…
Contemporary real-world online ad auctions differ from canonical models [Edelman et al., 2007; Varian, 2009] in at least four ways: (1) values and click-through rates can depend upon users' search queries, but advertisers can only partially…
Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…
Existing auto-bidding algorithms in digital advertising often treat the value of an ad opportunity as the revenue obtained when an ad is shown and/or clicked, and bid accordingly. This can lead to wasteful spending because the true value is…
In this paper, we study behavior of bidders in an experimental launch of a new advertising auction platform by Zillow, as Zillow switched from negotiated contracts to using auctions in several geographically isolated markets. A unique…
In online advertising, a set of potential advertisements can be ranked by a certain auction system where usually the top-1 advertisement would be selected and displayed at an advertising space. In this paper, we show a selection bias issue…
Within the private-values paradigm, we construct a tractable empirical model of equilibrium behavior at first-price auctions when bidders' valuations are potentially dependent, but not necessarily affiliated. We develop a test of…
Buyers (e.g., advertisers) often have limited financial and processing resources, and so their participation in auctions is throttled. Changes to auctions may affect bids or throttling and any change may affect what winners pay. This paper…
The first-price auction is popular in practice for its simplicity and transparency. Moreover, its potential virtues grow in complex settings where incentive compatible auctions may generate little or no revenue. Unfortunately, the…
When bidders bid on complex objects, they might be unaware of characteristics effecting their valuations. We assume that each buyer's valuation is a sum of independent random variables, one for each characteristic. When a bidder is unaware…
In this paper, we design and implement an experiment aimed at testing the level-k model of auctions. We begin by asking which (simple) environments can best disentangle the level-k model from its leading rival, Bayes-Nash equilibrium. We…
We experimentally evaluate the comparative performance of the winner-bid, average-bid, and loser-bid auctions for the dissolution of a partnership. The analysis of these auctions based on the empirical equilibrium refinement of Velez and…
Auction theories are believed to provide a better selling opportunity for the resources to be allocated. Various organizations have taken measures to increase trust among participants towards their auction system, but trust alone cannot…
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…
We advance empirical equilibrium analysis (Velez and Brown, 2020, arXiv:1907.12408) of the winner-bid and loser-bid auctions for the dissolution of a partnership. We show, in a complete information environment, that even though these…
Algorithms increasingly automate bidding in online auctions, raising concerns about tacit bid suppression and revenue shortfalls. Prior work identifies individual mechanisms behind algorithmic bid suppression, but it remains unclear which…
We study the optimal behavior of a bidder in a real-time auction subject to the requirement that a specified collections of heterogeneous items be acquired within given time constraints. The problem facing this bidder is cast as a…