论文标题
媒体机构在广告拍卖中的力量:通过协调的招标改善公用事业
The Power of Media Agencies in Ad Auctions: Improving Utility through Coordinated Bidding
论文作者
论文摘要
数字广告中日益增长的竞争导致媒体机构在广告商和销售广告老虎机的平台之间扮演中介机构的角色。当一组竞争广告商由普通代理商管理时,可以通过协调竞标策略来实施许多形式的勾结,例如出价索具,从而大大提高广告商的价值。我们研究了在GSP和VCG机制下发现竞标和货币转移最大化的货币转移的问题。首先,我们引入了一个抽象的投标优化问题 - 称为加权实用程序问题(WUP),这对于证明我们的结果很有用。我们表明,投标策略的实用程序与定向无环的图形中的路径长度有关,其结构和权重取决于所研究的机制。这使我们能够通过找到图表的最短路径来解决多项式时间。接下来,我们切换到我们的原始问题,重点关注两种因其允许的激励措施而不同的设置。激励限制确保颜色不会离开代理机构,并且可以通过在代理商和广告商之间实施货币转移来执行。特别是,我们研究了任意转移设置,允许允许向广告商进行任何货币转移,以及更现实的有限责任设置,在该设置中,该机构无法支付广告商。在前者中,我们将问题作为WUP实例抛弃,并通过基于图的算法解决该问题,而在后者中,我们将其作为线性程序进行了形式,并通过将椭圆形算法应用于双重算法,可以有效地求解呈指数式的变量。这需要在多项式时间内解决合适的分离问题,这可以通过将其减少为WUP实例来完成。
The increasing competition in digital advertising induced a proliferation of media agencies playing the role of intermediaries between advertisers and platforms selling ad slots. When a group of competing advertisers is managed by a common agency, many forms of collusion, such as bid rigging, can be implemented by coordinating bidding strategies, dramatically increasing advertisers' value. We study the problem of finding bids and monetary transfers maximizing the utility of a group of colluders, under GSP and VCG mechanisms. First, we introduce an abstract bid optimization problem -- called weighted utility problem (WUP) -- , which is useful in proving our results. We show that the utilities of bidding strategies are related to the length of paths in a directed acyclic weighted graph, whose structure and weights depend on the mechanism under study. This allows us to solve WUP in polynomial time by finding a shortest path of the graph. Next, we switch to our original problem, focusing on two settings that differ for the incentives they allow for. Incentive constraints ensure that colluders do not leave the agency, and they can be enforced by implementing monetary transfers between the agency and the advertisers. In particular, we study the arbitrary transfers setting, where any kind of monetary transfer to and from the advertisers is allowed, and the more realistic limited liability setting, in which no advertiser can be paid by the agency. In the former, we cast the problem as a WUP instance and solve it by our graph-based algorithm, while, in the latter, we formulate it as a linear program with exponentially-many variables efficiently solvable by applying the ellipsoid algorithm to its dual. This requires to solve a suitable separation problem in polynomial time, which can be done by reducing it to a WUP instance.