Related papers: Learning and Collusion in Multi-unit Auctions
We study whether large language models acting as autonomous bidders can tacitly collude by coordinating when to accept platform posted payouts in repeated Dutch auctions, without any communication. We present a minimal repeated auction…
We study the problem of finding the optimal bidding strategy for an advertiser in a multi-platform auction setting. The competition on a platform is captured by a value and a cost function, mapping bidding strategies to value and cost…
In this thesis, we research learning algorithms for optimal decision making in two different contexts, Reinforcement Learning in Part I and Auction Design in Part II. Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning that is…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
Previous works suggested the use of Branch and Bound techniques for finding the optimal allocation in (multi-unit) combinatorial auctions. They remarked that Linear Programming could provide a good upper-bound to the optimal allocation, but…
Auction-based recommender systems are prevalent in online advertising platforms, but they are typically optimized to allocate recommendation slots based on immediate expected return metrics, neglecting the downstream effects of…
We study a general class of repeated auctions, such as the ones found in electricity markets, as multi-agent games between the bidders. In such a repeated setting, bidders can adapt their strategies online based on the data observed in the…
Auctions are widely used in exchanges to match buy and sell requests. Once the buyers and sellers place their requests, the exchange determines how these requests are to be matched. The two most popular objectives used while determining the…
Iterative combinatorial auctions (CAs) are often used in multi-billion dollar domains like spectrum auctions, and speed of convergence is one of the crucial factors behind the choice of a specific design for practical applications. To…
We study the problem of learning revenue-optimal multi-bidder auctions from samples when the samples of bidders' valuations can be adversarially corrupted or drawn from distributions that are adversarially perturbed. First, we prove tight…
We consider the problem of online allocation subject to a long-term fairness penalty. Contrary to existing works, however, we do not assume that the decision-maker observes the protected attributes -- which is often unrealistic in practice.…
Despite some promising results in federated learning using game-theoretical methods, most existing studies mainly employ a one-level game in either a cooperative or competitive environment, failing to capture the complex dynamics among…
Automated bidding to optimize online advertising with various constraints, e.g. ROI constraints and budget constraints, is widely adopted by advertisers. A key challenge lies in designing algorithms for non-truthful mechanisms with ROI…
Finding optimal solutions for multi-unit combinatorial auctions is a hard problem and finding approximations to the optimal solution is also hard. We investigate the use of Branch-and-Bound techniques: they require both a way to bound from…
Sequential posted pricing auctions are popular because of their simplicity in practice and their tractability in theory. A usual assumption in their study is that the Bayesian prior distributions of the buyers are known to the seller, while…
Auctions are becoming an increasingly popular method for transacting business, especially over the Internet. This article presents a general approach to building autonomous bidding agents to bid in multiple simultaneous auctions for…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
The convergence properties of learning dynamics in repeated auctions is a timely and important question, with numerous applications in, e.g., online advertising markets. This work focuses on repeated first-price auctions where bidders with…
Designing an incentive compatible auction that maximizes expected revenue is a central problem in Auction Design. Theoretical approaches to the problem have hit some limits in the past decades and analytical solutions are known for only a…
We study the problem of auction design for advertising platforms that face strategic advertisers who are bidding across platforms. Each advertiser's goal is to maximize their total value or conversions while satisfying some constraint(s)…