Repeated budgeted second price ad auction

Asaph Arnon, Yishay Mansour*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

Our main goal is to abstract existing repeated sponsored search ad auction mechanisms which incorporate budgets, and study their equilibrium and dynamics. Our abstraction has multiple agents bidding repeatedly for multiple identical items (such as impressions in an ad auction). The agents are budget limited and have a value per item. We abstract this repeated interaction as a one-shot game, which we call budget auction, where agents submit a bid and a budget, and then items are sold by a sequential second price auction. Once an agent exhausts its budget it does not participate in the proceeding auctions. Our main result shows that if agents bid conservatively (never bid above their value) then there always exists a pure Nash equilibrium. We also study simple dynamics of repeated budget auctions, showing their convergence to a Nash equilibrium for two agents and for multiple agents with identical budgets.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)453-478
Number of pages26
JournalTheory of Computing Systems
Volume54
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2014

Funding

FundersFunder number
Google Inter-university center for Electronic Markets and Auctions
Israel Science Foundation
Israeli Ministry of Science
Maryland Ornithological Society
United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation
Israeli Centers for Research Excellence4/11

    Keywords

    • Algorithmic game theory
    • Auctions
    • Budget
    • Sponsored search

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