Theory Seminar: Brendan Lucier

This week’s speaker is Brendan Lucier, of Microsoft Research. As usual, the talk will take place in Room 401B, 3401 Walnut Street on Friday 12-1 PM. Talk details are below.

Title: A Game of Autobidders: Strategic Budget Selection in a Competitive Autobidding World

Abstract: Many online platforms have associated algorithmic tools designed to help optimize usage, such as autobidders or price optimizers. But as adoption of these tools becomes universal, we must consider how they interact with the platform and with each other. How will users strategically maneuver their usage of these tools, and what will be the overall impact on the market?

In this talk we will explore these questions through the lens of autobidding in online advertising. A platform sells ad impressions by auction and provides access to autobidding algorithms that compete on their advertisers’ behalf. Each advertiser strategically chooses how much budget their autobidding algorithm will have to work with. Advertiser payoffs in this budget-selecting “metagame” are determined by the equilibrium reached by the autobidders in the “inner” bidding game. We analyze the equilibria of the budget-selecting metagame and show that they are approximately efficient for first-price auctions, even for broad classes of advertiser preferences over outcomes and money. We will also discuss implications for auction and autobidder design.

Joint work with Yiding Feng and Alex Slivkins.