Boosted Second Price Auctions: Revenue Optimization for Heterogeneous Bidders

47 Pages Posted: 12 Aug 2017 Last revised: 17 Mar 2019

See all articles by Negin Golrezaei

Negin Golrezaei

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management

Max Lin

Google Inc.

Vahab Mirrokni

Google Research

Hamid Nazerzadeh

University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business

Date Written: August 10, 2017

Abstract

The second price auction has been the prevalent auction format used by advertising exchanges because of its simplicity and desirable incentive properties. However, even with an optimized choice of reserve prices, this auction is not revenue optimal when the bidders are heterogeneous and their valuation distributions differ significantly. In order to optimize the revenue of advertising exchanges, we propose an auction format called the boosted second price auction, which assigns a boost value to each bidder. The auction favors bidders with higher boost values and allocates the item to the bidder with the highest boosted bid. We propose a data-driven approach to optimize boost values using the previous bids of the bidders. Our analysis of auction data from Google’s online advertising exchange shows that the boosted second price auction with data-optimized boost values outperforms the second price auction and empirical Myerson auction by up to 6% and 3%, respectively.

Keywords: Boosted Second-price Auctions, Online Advertising, Heterogeneity, Brand, Retargeting

Suggested Citation

Golrezaei, Negin and Lin, Max and Mirrokni, Vahab and Nazerzadeh, Hamid, Boosted Second Price Auctions: Revenue Optimization for Heterogeneous Bidders (August 10, 2017). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3016465 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3016465

Negin Golrezaei (Contact Author)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management ( email )

100 Main Street
E62-416
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States
02141 (Fax)

Max Lin

Google Inc. ( email )

Vahab Mirrokni

Google Research ( email )

Hamid Nazerzadeh

University of Southern California - Marshall School of Business ( email )

Bridge Memorial Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90089
United States

HOME PAGE: http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~nazerzad/

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