论文标题
竞标者在拍卖设计中选择问题
Bidder Subset Selection Problem in Auction Design
论文作者
论文摘要
出于在线广告行业的实际问题,我们研究了单项拍卖中的投标子集选择问题。在此问题中,大量的候选竞标者具有从已知的先前分布中取得的独立值。卖方需要选择投标人的子集,并在选定子集上运行给定的拍卖格式,以最大程度地提高其预期收入。我们为子集限制提出了两个框架:(i)对选定竞标者集的容量限制; (ii)邀请拍卖的投标人的费用。对于匿名储备(SPA-AR)的第二价格拍卖,我们在两个框架中都会提供持续的近似多项式时间算法(在后面的框架下,在对市场的轻度假设下)。我们的结果与Mehta,Nadav,Psomas,Rubinstein [Neurips 2020]的先前工作形成鲜明对比,后者在没有储备价格的情况下显示了水疗中心的近似硬度。我们还为其他经过良好研究的拍卖格式(例如匿名发布的定价和连续发布的定价)提供了免费的近似结果。从技术层面上讲,我们发现SPA-AR作为SET函数的收入$ f(s)$ f(s)$ s $ s $是分数的,但不是subsodular。我们的竞标者选择问题与邀请成本是一个自然的问题,即(大约)在给定成本的矢量下(\ cdot)$的需求甲骨文,这是组合拍卖文献中的常见计算假设。
Motivated by practical concerns in the online advertising industry, we study a bidder subset selection problem in single-item auctions. In this problem, a large pool of candidate bidders have independent values sampled from known prior distributions. The seller needs to pick a subset of bidders and run a given auction format on the selected subset to maximize her expected revenue. We propose two frameworks for the subset restrictions: (i) capacity constraint on the set of selected bidders; and (ii) incurred costs for the bidders invited to the auction. For the second-price auction with anonymous reserve (SPA-AR), we give constant approximation polynomial time algorithms in both frameworks (in the latter framework under mild assumptions about the market). Our results are in stark contrast to the previous work of Mehta, Nadav, Psomas, Rubinstein [NeurIPS 2020], who showed hardness of approximation for the SPA without a reserve price. We also give complimentary approximation results for other well-studied auction formats such as anonymous posted pricing and sequential posted pricing. On a technical level, we find that the revenue of SPA-AR as a set function $f(S)$ of its bidders $S$ is fractionally-subadditive but not submodular. Our bidder selection problem with invitation costs is a natural question about (approximately) answering a demand oracle for $f(\cdot)$ under a given vector of costs, a common computational assumption in the literature on combinatorial auctions.