Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
This paper studies the revenue of simple mechanisms in settings where a third-party data provider is present. When no data provider is present, it is known that simple mechanisms achieve a constant fraction of the revenue of optimal mechanisms. The results in this paper demonstrate that this is no longer true in the presence of a third party data provider who can provide the bidder with a signal that is correlated with the item type. Specifically, we show that even with a single seller, a single bidder, and a single item of uncertain type for sale, pricing each item-type separately (the analog of item pricing for multi-item auctions) and bundling all item-types under a single price (the analog of grand bundling) can both simultaneously be a logarithmic factor worse than the optimal revenue. Further, in the presence of a data provider, item-type partitioning mechanisms---a more general class of mechanisms which divide item-types into disjoint groups and offer prices for each group---still cannot achieve within a $log log$ factor of the optimal revenue. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2018 | 10.1145/3379478 | Proceedings of the ACM on Measurement and Analysis of Computing Systems |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
ad auctions,information asymmetries,mechanism design,signaling,simple mechanisms | Revenue,Mathematical economics,Mathematical optimization,Disjoint sets,Third party,Common value auction,Logarithm,Mathematics | Journal |
Volume | Issue | ISSN |
4 | 1 | 2476-1249 |
ISBN | Citations | PageRank |
978-1-4503-7985-4 | 0 | 0.34 |
References | Authors | |
9 | 6 | |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yang Cai | 1 | 330 | 25.53 |
| Federico Echenique | 2 | 101 | 21.70 |
| Hu Fu | 3 | 310 | 23.33 |
| Katrina Ligett | 4 | 923 | 66.19 |
| Adam Wierman | 5 | 1635 | 106.57 |
| Juba Ziani | 6 | 29 | 5.77 |