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Dynamic Mechanism Design in the Field

Published: 10 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Dynamic mechanisms are a powerful technique in designing revenue-maximizing repeated auctions. Despite their strength, these types of mechanisms have not been widely adopted in practice for several reasons, e.g., for their complexity, and for their sensitivity to the accuracy of predicting buyers» value distributions. In this paper, we aim to address these shortcomings and develop simple dynamic mechanisms that can be implemented efficiently, and provide theoretical guidelines for decreasing the sensitivity of dynamic mechanisms on prediction accuracy of buyers» value distributions. We prove that the dynamic mechanism we propose is provably dynamic incentive compatible, and introduce a notion of buyers» regret in dynamic mechanisms, and show that our mechanism achieves bounded regret while improving revenue and social welfare compared to a static reserve pricing policy. Finally, we confirm our theoretical analysis via an extensive empirical study of our dynamic auction on real data sets from online adverting. For example, we show our dynamic mechanisms can provide a +17% revenue lift with relative regret less than 0.2%.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)User Response in Ad Auctions: An MDP Formulation of Long-term Revenue OptimizationProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645495(111-122)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2024)Dynamic Mechanism Design via AI-Driven ApproachesAI-Driven Mechanism Design10.1007/978-981-97-9286-3_3(53-93)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
  • (2023)Autobidding Auctions in the Presence of User CostsProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543507.3583234(3428-3435)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WWW '18: Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference
April 2018
2000 pages
ISBN:9781450356398
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • IW3C2: International World Wide Web Conference Committee

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International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee

Republic and Canton of Geneva, Switzerland

Publication History

Published: 10 April 2018

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Author Tags

  1. bank account mechanisms
  2. dynamic auctions
  3. dynamic mechanism design
  4. dynamic second price auction

Qualifiers

  • Research-article

Funding Sources

  • a Tsinghua Initiative Scientific Research Grant
  • the Natural Science Foundation of China Grant
  • a China Youth 1000-talent program
  • the National Basic Research Program of China Grant

Conference

WWW '18
Sponsor:
  • IW3C2
WWW '18: The Web Conference 2018
April 23 - 27, 2018
Lyon, France

Acceptance Rates

WWW '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 170 of 1,155 submissions, 15%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)User Response in Ad Auctions: An MDP Formulation of Long-term Revenue OptimizationProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202410.1145/3589334.3645495(111-122)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2024)Dynamic Mechanism Design via AI-Driven ApproachesAI-Driven Mechanism Design10.1007/978-981-97-9286-3_3(53-93)Online publication date: 30-Sep-2024
  • (2023)Autobidding Auctions in the Presence of User CostsProceedings of the ACM Web Conference 202310.1145/3543507.3583234(3428-3435)Online publication date: 30-Apr-2023
  • (2021)Non-excludable dynamic mechanism designProceedings of the Thirty-Second Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms10.5555/3458064.3458146(1357-1373)Online publication date: 10-Jan-2021
  • (2021)Multi-objective Dynamic Auction Mechanism for Online Advertising2021 IEEE International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference (IPCCC)10.1109/IPCCC51483.2021.9679425(1-8)Online publication date: 29-Oct-2021
  • (2019)Automated Mechanism Design via Neural NetworksProceedings of the 18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3306127.3331696(215-223)Online publication date: 8-May-2019
  • (2019)Testing Dynamic Incentive Compatibility in Display Ad AuctionsProceedings of the 25th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining10.1145/3292500.3330943(1616-1624)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2019
  • (2018)Ex-post IR dynamic auctions with cost-per-action paymentsProceedings of the 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence10.5555/3304415.3304487(505-511)Online publication date: 13-Jul-2018
  • (2018)Ex-post IR Dynamic Auctions with Cost-per-action PaymentsProceedings of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3237383.3238077(2076-2078)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2018
  • (undefined)Dynamic Double Auctions: Towards First BestSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.3213460

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