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Online advertising in E-commerce platforms provides sellers an opportunity to achieve potential audiences with different target goals. Ad serving systems (like display and search advertising systems) that assign ads to pages should satisfy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-09 Chao Wei , Weiru Zhang , Shengjie Sun , Fei Li , Xiaonan Meng , Yi Hu , Hao Wang

The computation of equilibrium prices at which the supply of goods matches their demand typically relies on complete information on agents' private attributes, e.g., suppliers' cost functions, which are often unavailable in practice.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Devansh Jalota , Haoyuan Sun , Navid Azizan

Advertising becomes one of the most popular ways of monetizing an online transaction platform. Usually, sponsored advertisements are posted on the most attractive positions to enhance the number of clicks. However, multiple e-commerce…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-04-22 Weian Li , Qi Qi , Changjun Wang , Changyuan Yu

While the auto-bidding literature predominantly considers independent bidding, we investigate the coordination problem among multiple auto-bidders in online advertising platforms. Two motivating scenarios are: collaborative bidding among…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yanru Guan , Jiahao Zhang , Zhe Feng , Tao Lin

Two issues of algorithmic collusion are addressed in this paper. First, we show that in a general class of symmetric games, including Prisoner's Dilemma, Bertrand competition, and any (nonlinear) mixture of first and second price auction,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-09-05 Zhang Xu , Wei Zhao

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…

General Economics · Economics 2026-03-24 Pranjal Rawat

In online advertising markets, budget-constrained advertisers acquire ad placements through repeated bidding in auctions on various platforms. We present a strategy for bidding optimally in a set of auctions that may or may not be…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Fransisca Susan , Negin Golrezaei , Okke Schrijvers

This paper develops learning-augmented algorithms for energy trading in volatile electricity markets. The basic problem is to sell (or buy) $k$ units of energy for the highest revenue (lowest cost) over uncertain time-varying prices, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-29 Russell Lee , Bo Sun , Mohammad Hajiesmaili , John C. S. Lui

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Yuxiao Wen , Zihao Hu , Yanjun Han , Yuan Yao , Zhengyuan Zhou

Recent work shows that pricing with symmetric LLM agents leads to algorithmic collusion. We show that collusion is fragile under the heterogeneity typical of real deployments. In a stylized repeated-pricing model, heterogeneity in patience…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Jussi Keppo , Yuze Li , Gerry Tsoukalas , Nuo Yuan

Motivated by online retail, we consider the problem of selling one item (e.g., an ad slot) to two non-excludable buyers (say, a merchant and a brand). This problem captures, for example, situations where a merchant and a brand cooperatively…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Gagan Aggarwal , Ashwinkumar Badanidiyuru , Paul Dütting , Federico Fusco

Matching problems have been widely studied in the research community, especially Ad-Auctions with many applications ranging from network design to advertising. Following the various advancements in machine learning, one natural question is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Eniko Kevi , Nguyen Kim Thang

In this paper we apply active learning algorithms for dynamic pricing in a prominent e-commerce website. Dynamic pricing involves changing the price of items on a regular basis, and uses the feedback from the pricing decisions to update…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-02-12 Ravi Ganti , Matyas Sustik , Quoc Tran , Brian Seaman

We introduce pricing formulas for competition and collusion models of two-sided markets with an outside option. For the competition model, we find conditions under which prices and consumer surplus may increase or decrease if the outside…

General Economics · Economics 2025-05-12 Cristian Chica , Yinglong Guo , Gilad Lerman

We consider a setting where $n$ buyers, with combinatorial preferences over $m$ items, and a seller, running a priority-based allocation mechanism, repeatedly interact. Our goal, from observing limited information about the results of these…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-08-29 Avrim Blum , Yishay Mansour , Jamie Morgenstern

We study revenue optimization learning algorithms for repeated second-price auctions with reserve where a seller interacts with multiple strategic bidders each of which holds a fixed private valuation for a good and seeks to maximize his…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-06-25 Alexey Drutsa

This paper explains four things in a unified way. First, how e-commerce can generate price equilibria where physical shops either compete with virtual shops for consumers with Internet access, or alternatively, sell only to consumers with…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Pedro Pereira , Cristina Mazón

In the online (time-series) search problem, a player is presented with a sequence of prices which are revealed in an online manner. In the standard definition of the problem, for each revealed price, the player must decide irrevocably…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-12-06 Spyros Angelopoulos , Shahin Kamali , Dehou Zhang

This paper studies the measurement of advertising effects on online platforms when parallel experimentation occurs, that is, when multiple advertisers experiment concurrently. It provides a framework that makes precise how parallel…

General Economics · Economics 2024-03-01 Caio Waisman , Navdeep S. Sahni , Harikesh S. Nair , Xiliang Lin

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-02-15 Martino Banchio , Andrzej Skrzypacz