Mature internet advertising platforms offer high-level campaign management tools to help advertisers run their campaigns, often abstracting away the intricacies of how each ad is placed and focusing on aggregate metrics of interest to advertisers. On such platforms, advertisers often participate in auctions through a proxy bidder, so the standard incentive analyses that are common in the literature do not apply directly. In this paper, we take the perspective of a budget management system that surfaces aggregated incentives -- instead of individual auctions -- and compare first and second price auctions. We show that theory offers surprising endorsement for using a first price auction to sell individual impressions. In particular, first price auctions guarantee uniqueness of the steady-state equilibrium of the budget management system, monotonicity, and other desirable properties, as well as efficient computation through the solution to the well-studied Eisenberg-Gale convex program. Contrary to what one can expect from first price auctions, we show that incentives issues are not a barrier that undermines the system. Using realistic instances generated from data collected at real-world auction platforms, we show that bidders have small regret with respect to their optimal ex-post strategy, and they do not have a big incentive to misreport when they can influence equilibria directly by giving inputs strategically. Finally, budget-constrained bidders, who have significant prevalence in real-world platforms, tend to have smaller regrets. Our computations indicate that bidder budgets, pacing multipliers and regrets all have a positive association in statistical terms.
翻译:互联网广告平台提供高层次的互联网广告管理工具,帮助广告商开展竞选活动,往往抽取每条广告如何刊登的错综复杂之处,并侧重于广告商感兴趣的总体衡量标准。在这些平台上,广告商往往通过代理投标人参与拍卖,因此文献中常见的标准激励分析不会直接适用。在本文件中,我们从预算管理系统的角度来看待预算管理系统,该系统展示了各种奖励,而不是个别拍卖,比较了第一和第二次价格拍卖。我们表明,理论为利用第一次价格拍卖来推销个人印象提供了令人惊讶的认可。特别是,第一次价格拍卖保证预算管理系统稳定状态平衡的独特性、单一性和其他可取性,并通过研究周密的Eisenberg-Gale convex方案解决方案进行高效的计算。与人们可以从第一次价格拍卖中得到的预期相反,我们表明激励问题并不是一个破坏系统的障碍。使用从真实世界拍卖平台收集的所有数据生成的实实在在实例,我们显示,投标商对预算稳定性平衡性平衡性、在最优化的市面策略下,他们不会对最终的市值产生真正的预算影响。