Related papers: Optimal strategy against straightforward bidding i…

We study a real-time bidding problem resulting from a set of contractual obligations stipulating that a firm win a specified number of heterogeneous impressions or ad placements over a defined duration in a real-time auction. The contracts…

The system operator's scheduling problem in electricity markets, called unit commitment, is a non-convex mixed-integer program. The optimal value function is non-convex, preventing the application of traditional marginal pricing theory to…

Learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions is a fundamental problem at the interface of game theory and machine learning, which has seen a recent surge in interest due to the transition of display advertising to first-price auctions.…

We consider auctions with N+1 bidders. Of these, N are symmetric and N+1 is "sufficiently strong" relative to the others. The auction is a "tournament" in which the first N players bid to win the right to compete with N+1. The bids of the…

In many practical settings control decisions must be made under partial/imperfect information about the evolution of a relevant state variable. Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) is a relatively well-developed framework…

In an all-pay auction, only one bidder wins but all bidders must pay the auctioneer. All-pay bidding games arise from attaching a similar bidding structure to traditional combinatorial games to determine which player moves next. In contrast…

In Bayesian single-item auctions, a monotone bidding strategy--one that prescribes a higher bid for a higher value type--can be equivalently represented as a partition of the quantile space into consecutive intervals corresponding to…

In practice, most auction mechanisms are not strategy-proof, so equilibrium analysis is required to predict bidding behavior. In many auctions, though, an exact equilibrium is not known and one would like to understand whether -- manually…

We revisit the well-studied problem of budget-feasible procurement, where a buyer with a strict budget constraint seeks to acquire services from a group of strategic providers (the sellers). During the last decade, several strategyproof…

In real time electricity markets, the objective of generation companies while bidding is to maximize their profit. The strategies for learning optimal bidding have been formulated through game theoretical approaches and stochastic…

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are a natural and general model in reinforcement learning that take into account the agent's uncertainty about its current state. In the literature on POMDPs, it is customary to assume…

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) form a prominent model for uncertainty in sequential decision making. We are interested in constructing algorithms with theoretical guarantees to determine whether the agent has a…

Real-time bidding has emerged as an effective online advertising technique. With real-time bidding, advertisers can position ads per impression, enabling them to optimise ad campaigns by targeting specific audiences in real-time. This paper…

We analyze the problem of how to optimally bid for ad spaces in online ad auctions. For this we consider the general case of multiple ad campaigns with overlapping targeting criteria. In our analysis we first characterize the structure of…

Partially-observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with discounted-sum payoff are a standard framework to model a wide range of problems related to decision making under uncertainty. Traditionally, the goal has been to obtain policies…

Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) have recently become popular among many AI researchers because they serve as a natural model for planning under uncertainty. Value iteration is a well-known algorithm for finding…

This paper develops the theory of mechanism redesign by which an auctioneer can reoptimize an auction based on bid data collected from previous iterations of the auction on bidders from the same market. We give a direct method for…

Strategic bidding problems in electricity markets are widely studied in power systems, often by formulating complex bi-level optimization problems that are hard to solve. The state-of-the-art approach to solve such problems is to…

In markets such as digital advertising auctions, bidders want to maximize value rather than payoff. This is different to the utility functions typically assumed in auction theory and leads to different strategies and outcomes. We refer to…

Optimal decision-making under partial observability requires agents to balance reducing uncertainty (exploration) against pursuing immediate objectives (exploitation). In this paper, we introduce a novel policy optimization framework for…