EconBase
← All papers

Reserve Price Optimization for First Price Auctions

Zhe Feng, Sébastien Lahaie, Jon Schneider, Jinchao Ye

arXiv 11 Jun 2020 · cs.GT · 6 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2006.06519 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

The display advertising industry has recently transitioned from second- to first-price auctions as its primary mechanism for ad allocation and pricing. In light of this, publishers need to re-evaluate and optimize their auction parameters, notably reserve prices. In this paper, we propose a gradient-based algorithm to adaptively update and optimize reserve prices based on estimates of bidders' responsiveness to experimental shocks in reserves. Our key innovation is to draw on the inherent structure of the revenue objective in order to reduce the variance of gradient estimates and improve convergence rates in both theory and practice. We show that revenue in a first-price auction can be usefully decomposed into a demand component and a bidding component, and introduce techniques to reduce the variance of each component. We characterize the bias-variance trade-offs of these techniques and validate the performance of our proposed algorithm through experiments on synthetic data and real display ad auctions data from Google ad exchange.

Citation extraction

30
references
43
in-text mentions
30
distinct cited
1
self-citations
6,408
main-text words

appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 49% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1S. Liu, X. Li, P. Chen, J. Haupt, and L. Amini (2018) Zeroth-order stochastic projected gradient descent for nonconvex optimization0.7373367%
2Krishnakumar Balasubramanian and Saeed Ghadimi (2018) Zeroth-order nonconvex stochastic optimization: Handling constraints, high-dimensionality and saddle-points, 20180.73732100%
3Saeed. Ghadimi and Guanghui. Lan (2013) Stochastic first- and zeroth-order methods for nonconvex stochastic programming0.73732100%
4Vijay Krishna (2009) Auction theory0.73732100%
5Saeed Ghadimi (2019) Conditional gradient type methods for composite nonlinear and stochastic optimization0.64422100%
6Steven A. Matthews (1995) A Technical Primer on Auction Theory I: Independent Private Values0.64422100%
7Mehryar Mohri and Andrés Muñoz Medina (2016) Learning algorithms for second-price auctions with reserve0.51121100%
8Andres Munoz and Sergei Vassilvitskii (2017) Revenue optimization with approximate bid predictions0.51121100%
9R. Myerson (1981) Optimal auction design0.51121100%
10Alekh Agarwal, Ofer Dekel, and Lin Xiao (2010) Optimal algorithms for online convex optimization with multi-point bandit feedback0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 30 scored citations.