Speaker: Eva Tardos

Affiliation: Cornell University

Abstract:

Auctions for selling advertisement space have been the main mechanism used to monetize Internet services. These auctions give rise to a number of interesting challenges not traditionally considered by auction theory. Search advertising gives rise of an enormous number of auctions running simultaneously, necessitating the use of extremely simple mechanisms. Traditional auction theory tells us how to design optimal auctions (maximizing welfare or revenue), but typically results in designs that are too complex for the web environment, where it is essential for auctions to have extremely clear and simple design.

Over the last 10+ years we have developed a good understanding of many games naturally arising in the context of Internet or web services from the perspective of the resulting social welfare, including a good understanding of games modeling selfish traffic routing, service location, bandwidth sharing among others. In this talk we will consider auctions from this perspective in various settings including the commonly used auction format Generalized Second Price.