Related papers: Optimal strategy against straightforward bidding i…

A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…

This paper studies optimal market making for large-tick assets in the presence of latency. We consider a random walk model for the asset price, and formulate the market maker's optimization problem using Markov Decision Processes (MDP). We…

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…

In non-truthful auctions such as first-price and all-pay auctions, the independent strategic behaviors of bidders, with the corresponding Bayes-Nash equilibrium notion, are notoriously difficult to characterize and can cause undesirable…

We consider the problem of optimally utilizing $N$ resources, each in an unknown binary state. The state of each resource can be inferred from state-dependent noisy measurements. Depending on its state, utilizing a resource results in…

We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with a set of target states and positive integer costs associated with every transition. The traditional optimization objective (stochastic shortest path) asks to minimize…

First-price auctions have very recently swept the online advertising industry, replacing second-price auctions as the predominant auction mechanism on many platforms. This shift has brought forth important challenges for a bidder: how…

Convergence (virtual) bidding is an important part of two-settlement electric power markets as it can effectively reduce discrepancies between the day-ahead and real-time markets. Consequently, there is extensive research into the bidding…

We study a class of manipulations in combinatorial auctions where bidders fundamentally misrepresent what goods they are interested in. Prior work has largely assumed that bidders only submit bids on their bundles of interest, which we call…

This work proposes a bid shading strategy for first-price auctions as a measure-valued optimization problem. We consider a standard parametric form for bid shading and formulate the problem as convex optimization over the joint distribution…

This paper looks at predictability problems, i.e., wherein an agent must choose its strategy in order to optimize the predictions that an external observer could make. We address these problems while taking into account uncertainties on the…

Policies for partially observed Markov decision processes can be efficiently learned by imitating policies for the corresponding fully observed Markov decision processes. Unfortunately, existing approaches for this kind of imitation…

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…

This paper studies Markov perfect equilibria in a repeated duopoly model where sellers choose algorithms. An algorithm is a mapping from the competitor's price to own price. Once set, algorithms respond quickly. Customers arrive randomly…

Advertisers in online ad auctions are increasingly using auto-bidding mechanisms to bid into auctions instead of directly bidding their value manually. One prominent auto-bidding format is the target cost-per-acquisition (tCPA) which…

Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is a framework applicable to many real world problems. In this work, we propose an approach to solve POMDPs with multimodal belief by relying on a policy that solves the fully observable…

Real-time bidding (RTB) based display advertising has become one of the key technological advances in computational advertising. RTB enables advertisers to buy individual ad impressions via an auction in real-time and facilitates the…

Traditional combinatorial spectrum auctions mainly rely on fixed bidding and matching processes, which limit participants' ability to adapt their strategies and often result in suboptimal social welfare in dynamic spectrum sharing…

We study the problem of synthesizing a controller that maximizes the entropy of a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) subject to a constraint on the expected total reward. Such a controller minimizes the predictability of a…

A seller wants to sell an item to $n$ buyers. Buyer valuations are drawn i.i.d. from a distribution unknown to the seller; the seller only knows that the support is included in $[a, b]$. To be robust, the seller chooses a DSIC mechanism…