论文标题
价格显示的广告拍卖效率
Efficiency of Ad Auctions with Price Displaying
论文作者
论文摘要
大多数经济报告预测，在未来十年（每年高达6万亿美元）中，AI在全球市场价值中的几乎一半将用于营销和销售。特别是，AI将能够优化越来越复杂的经济环境，其中需要共同自动化多个不同的活动。例如，Google Hotel Ads和TripAdvisor就是这种情况，在该广告和TripAdvisor上，拍卖可用于展示类似产品或服务的广告及其价格。与古典广告拍卖中一样，广告的排名取决于广告商的出价，而与经典环境不同，广告与其价格一起显示，以提供直接的比较。这极大地影响了用户的行为以及广告拍卖的特性。我们表明，在这种情况下，可以通过直接启动机制来实现社会福利最大化，该机制在多项式时间内共同优化了广告分配和广告商的价格将与他们展示。但是，实际上，广告商不太可能允许该机制代表他们选择价格。实际上，在常见的机制中，广告分配和价格优化被脱钩，以便广告商优化价格和投标，而机制一旦给出了价格和投标，则该机制确实为分配。我们研究了这种解耦如何影响机制的效率。特别是，我们研究了无政府状态（POA）的价格以及通过VCG和GSP付款的间接启示机制的稳定价格（POS）的价格（POS），这表明收入的POS即使有两个插槽也可能无限，而社会福利的POA也可能与插槽数量一样大。尽管如此，我们表明，在一些假设下，用VCG付款对间接启示机制进行了简单修改，为收入达到了1个POS。
Most of the economic reports forecast that almost half of the worldwide market value unlocked by AI over the next decade (up to 6 trillion USD per year) will be in marketing&sales. In particular, AI will enable the optimization of more and more intricate economic settings, in which multiple different activities need to be jointly automated. This is the case of, e.g., Google Hotel Ads and Tripadvisor, where auctions are used to display ads of similar products or services together with their prices. As in classical ad auctions, the ads are ranked depending on the advertisers' bids, whereas, differently from classical settings, ads are displayed together with their prices, so as to provide a direct comparison among them. This dramatically affects users' behavior, as well as the properties of ad auctions. We show that, in such settings, social welfare maximization can be achieved by means of a direct-revelation mechanism that jointly optimizes, in polynomial time, the ads allocation and the advertisers' prices to be displayed with them. However, in practice it is unlikely that advertisers allow the mechanism to choose prices on their behalf. Indeed, in commonly-adopted mechanisms, ads allocation and price optimization are decoupled, so that the advertisers optimize prices and bids, while the mechanism does so for the allocation, once prices and bids are given. We investigate how this decoupling affects the efficiency of mechanisms. In particular, we study the Price of Anarchy (PoA) and the Price of Stability (PoS) of indirect-revelation mechanisms with both VCG and GSP payments, showing that the PoS for the revenue may be unbounded even with two slots, and the PoA for the social welfare may be as large as the number of slots. Nevertheless, we show that, under some assumptions, simple modifications to the indirect-revelation mechanism with VCG payments achieve a PoS of 1 for the revenue.
