Related papers: Auction Design in an Auto-bidding Setting: Randomi…
We study sequential procurement auctions where the sellers are provided with a ``best and final offer'' (BAFO) strategy. This strategy allows each seller $i$ to effectively ``freeze'' their price while remaining active in the auction, and…
Randomized mechanisms, which map a set of bids to a probability distribution over outcomes rather than a single outcome, are an important but ill-understood area of computational mechanism design. We investigate the role of randomized…
We study the question of setting and testing reserve prices in single item auctions when the bidders are not identical. At a high level, there are two generalizations of the standard second price auction: in the lazy version we first…
In this paper, we study efficiency in truthful auctions via a social network, where a seller can only spread the information of an auction to the buyers through the buyers' network. In single-item auctions, we show that no mechanism is…
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…
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…
Digital advertising constitutes one of the main revenue sources for online platforms. In recent years, some advertisers tend to adopt auto-bidding tools to facilitate advertising performance optimization, making the classical \emph{utility…
Inspired by Internet ad auction applications, we study the problem of allocating a single item via an auction when bidders place very different values on the item. We formulate this as the problem of prior-free auction and focus on…
Analysis of efficiency of outcomes in game theoretic settings has been a main item of study at the intersection of economics and computer science. The notion of the price of anarchy takes a worst-case stance to efficiency analysis,…
Recent work has addressed the algorithmic problem of allocating advertisement space for keywords in sponsored search auctions so as to maximize revenue, most of which assume that pricing is done via a first-price auction. This does not…
The Price of Anarchy (PoA) is a well-established game-theoretic concept to shed light on coordination issues arising in open distributed systems. Leaving agents to selfishly optimize comes with the risk of ending up in sub-optimal states…
We quantify the value of the monopoly's bargaining power in terms of competition complexity--that is, the number of additional bidders the monopoly must attract in simple auctions to match the expected revenue of the optimal mechanisms…
The E-commerce advertising platforms typically sell commercial traffic through either second-price auction (SPA) or first-price auction (FPA). SPA was historically prevalent due to its dominant strategy incentive-compatible (DSIC) for…
Modern ad auctions allow advertisers to target more specific segments of the user population. Unfortunately, this is not always in the best interest of the ad platform. In this paper, we examine the following basic question in the context…
For the scalability of industrial online advertising systems, a two-stage auction architecture is widely used to enable efficient ad allocation on a large set of corpus within a limited response time. The current deployed two-stage ad…
We initiate the study of markets for private data, though the lens of differential privacy. Although the purchase and sale of private data has already begun on a large scale, a theory of privacy as a commodity is missing. In this paper, we…
In display advertising, advertisers want to achieve a marketing objective with constraints on budget and cost-per-outcome. This is usually formulated as an optimization problem that maximizes the total utility under constraints. The…
The Generalized Second Price auction is the primary method by which sponsered search advertisements are sold. We study the performance of this auction under various equilibrium concepts. In particular, we demonstrate that the Bayesian Price…
Existing auction mechanisms are vulnerable to bidder collusion, which substantially degrades revenue and non-colluder welfare. To design truthful mechanisms resilient to collusion, we introduce a novel approach that leverages a machine…
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…