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Autobidding Auctions in the Presence of User Costs

Published: 30 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

We study autobidding ad auctions with user costs, where each bidder is value-maximizing subject to a return-over-investment (ROI) constraint, and the seller aims to maximize the social welfare taking into consideration the user’s cost of viewing an ad. We show that in the worst case, the approximation ratio of social welfare by running the vanilla VCG auctions with user costs could as bad as 0. To improve the performance of VCG, We propose a new variant of VCG based on properly chosen cost multipliers, and prove that there exist auction-dependent and bidder-dependent cost multipliers that guarantee approximation ratios of 1/2 and 1/4 respectively in terms of the social welfare.

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cover image ACM Conferences
WWW '23: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2023
April 2023
4293 pages
ISBN:9781450394161
DOI:10.1145/3543507
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Published: 30 April 2023

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  1. autobidding
  2. mechanism design
  3. online advertising

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WWW '23
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WWW '23: The ACM Web Conference 2023
April 30 - May 4, 2023
TX, Austin, USA

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