[Game Theory Reading] Reading: (Thu 1:15pm) Auction Mechanism for Mixed Ads

[Dengji Zhao]

Dear all,

In this Thursday's game theory reading group, Dr. Sofia Ceppi from
Microsoft Research in Cambridge will give us a talk about the auction
mechanism to use when the auctioneer wants to move from a GSP to a VCG
auction and limits his loss in revenue.

Time/Venue: 4 June, 1:15pm - 2:00pm / B32 3073

Online participation: http://goo.gl/bTKsje

Title:
Auction Mechanism for Mixed Ads

Abstract:

The sponsored search auction currently used by search engines to decide
which ads to display and how much charge advertisers is a variation of the
Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction. Recent studies show that this type
of auction is no longer suitable because of the rich space of ads types
(e.g., images, rich media) and their combinations that are nowadays
available. Truthful auctions are not affected by problems that make the GSP
auction not appropriate anymore, and, thus, search engines should be
motivated to use them. However, suddenly changing the auction used, moving
from the GSP to a truthful one, can entail a significant loss in revenue
for the search engine.

In the talk, I will describe a hybrid auction mechanism to use during the
transition from the GSP auction to a truthful one that overcomes the
problem of the loss in revenue of the search engine. With this mechanism
bidders can be truthful or not and are accordingly treated differently. In
particular, the class of hybrid mechanisms gives incentives for
non-truthful bidders to bid truthfully, while behaving as a non-truthful
auction if no bidder is truthful.


To access all previous talks:
https://sites.google.com/site/sotonecsreadinggroups/resources
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