Related papers: Calibrated Click-Through Auctions: An Information …
We study information design in click-through auctions, in which the bidders/advertisers bid for winning an opportunity to show their ads but only pay for realized clicks. The payment may or may not happen, and its probability is called the…
We study the information design problem in a single-unit auction setting. The information designer controls independent private signals according to which the buyers infer their binary private values. Assuming that the seller adopts the…
In digital advertising, online platforms allocate ad impressions through real-time auctions, where advertisers typically rely on autobidding agents to optimize bids on their behalf. Unlike traditional auctions for physical goods, the value…
In this paper we design information elicitation mechanisms for Bayesian auctions. While in Bayesian mechanism design the distributions of the players' private types are often assumed to be common knowledge, information elicitation considers…
Calibration is a basic property for prediction systems, and algorithms for achieving it are well-studied in both statistics and machine learning. In many applications, however, the predictions are used to make decisions that select which…
Bidding is a key element of search advertising, but the variation in bidders' valuations and strategies is often overlooked. Disclosing bid information helps uncover this heterogeneity and enables platforms to tailor their disclosure…
In mechanism design, it is challenging to design the optimal auction with correlated values in general settings. Although value distribution can be further exploited to improve revenue, the complex correlation structure makes it hard to…
Digital advertising platforms and publishers sell ad inventory that conveys targeting information, such as demographic, contextual, or behavioral audience segments, to advertisers. While revealing this information improves ad relevance, it…
We study optimal auction design in an independent private values environment where bidders can endogenously -- but at a cost -- improve information about their own valuations. The optimal mechanism is two-stage: at stage-1 bidders register…
Classic results show that even an arbitrarily small correlation across bidders' information can enable full surplus extraction in auctions and related mechanism design settings. Motivated by this fragility, we study the information…
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…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…
In practice, auction data are often endogenously censored and anonymous, revealing only limited outcome statistics rather than full bid profiles. We study robust auction design when the seller observes only aggregated, anonymous order…
The auction of a single indivisible item is one of the most celebrated problems in mechanism design with transfers. Despite its simplicity, it provides arguably the cleanest and most insightful results in the literature. When the…
This paper studies a joint design problem where a seller can design both the signal structures for the agents to learn their values, and the allocation and payment rules for selling the item. In his seminal work, Myerson (1981) shows how to…
Internet search companies sell advertisement slots based on users' search queries via an auction. While there has been a lot of attention on the auction process and its game-theoretic aspects, our focus is on the advertisers. In particular,…
In a sponsored search auction the advertisement slots on a search result page are generally ordered by click-through rate. Bidders have a valuation, which is usually assumed to be linear in the click-through rate, a budget constraint, and…
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 present a deterministic exploration mechanism for sponsored search auctions, which enables the auctioneer to learn the relevance scores of advertisers, and allows advertisers to estimate the true value of clicks generated at the auction…
A standard result from auction theory is that bidding truthfully in a second price auction is a weakly dominant strategy. The result, however, does not apply in the presence of Cost Per Action (CPA) constraints. Such constraints exist, for…