Preferred Deals in General Environments

Preferred Deals in General Environments

Yuan Deng, Sébastien Lahaie, Vahab Mirrokni

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 231-237. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/33

A preferred deal is a special contract for selling impressions of display ad inventory. By accepting a deal, a buyer agrees to buy a minimum amount of impressions at a fixed price per impression, and is granted priority access to the impressions before they are sent to an open auction on an ad exchange. We consider the problem of designing preferred deals (inventory, price, quantity) in the presence of general convex constraints, including budget constraints, and propose an approximation algorithm to maximize the revenue obtained from the deals. We then evaluate our algorithm using auction data from a major advertising exchange and our empirical results show that the algorithm achieves around 95% of the optimal revenue.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Algorithmic Game Theory
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems