Related papers: Joint Value Estimation and Bidding in Repeated Fir…
We study risk-free bidding strategies in combinatorial auctions with incomplete information. Specifically, what is the maximum profit that a complement-free (subadditive) bidder can guarantee in a multi-item combinatorial auction? Suppose…
We study contextual dynamic pricing under a semiparametric demand model in which the purchase probability is $1-F(p-m(\mathbf{x}))$, where $m(\mathbf{x})$ captures mean utility as a function of product features and buyer covariates, and $F$…
We examine two types of binary betting markets, whose primary goal is for profit (such as sports gambling) or to gain information (such as prediction markets). We articulate the interplay between belief and price-setting to analyse both…
We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a…
In this paper, we deal with the uncertainty of bidding for display advertising. Similar to the financial market trading, real-time bidding (RTB) based display advertising employs an auction mechanism to automate the impression level media…
We consider a repeated auction where the buyer's utility for an item depends on the time that elapsed since his last purchase. We present an algorithm to build the optimal bidding policy, and then, because optimal might be impractical, we…
Most recent papers addressing the algorithmic problem of allocating advertisement space for keywords in sponsored search auctions assume that pricing is done via a first-price auction, which does not realistically model the Generalized…
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 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…
We investigate contextual online learning with nonparametric (Lipschitz) comparison classes under different assumptions on losses and feedback information. For full information feedback and Lipschitz losses, we design the first explicit…
In the context of advertising auctions, finding good reserve prices is a notoriously challenging learning problem. This is due to the heterogeneity of ad opportunity types and the non-convexity of the objective function. In this work, we…
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,…
The majority of online display ads are served through real-time bidding (RTB) --- each ad display impression is auctioned off in real-time when it is just being generated from a user visit. To place an ad automatically and optimally, it is…
We study a mechanism design problem where a seller aims to allocate a good to multiple bidders, each with a private value. The seller supports or favors a specific group, referred to as the minority group. Specifically, the seller requires…
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…
This paper proposes a theoretical analysis of recommendation systems in an online setting, where items are sequentially recommended to users over time. In each round, a user, randomly picked from a population of $m$ users, requests a…
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 many real-world applications, it is hard to provide a reward signal in each step of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) process and more natural to give feedback when an episode ends. To this end, we study the recently proposed model of RL…
We develop a framework for designing simple and efficient policies for a family of online allocation and pricing problems, that includes online packing, budget-constrained probing, dynamic pricing, and online contextual bandits with…
Recent advances, such as RegretNet, ALGnet, RegretFormer and CITransNet, use deep learning to approximate optimal multi item auctions by relaxing incentive compatibility (IC) and measuring its violation via ex post regret. However, the true…