Limited and online supply and the bayesian foundations of prior-free mechanism design

We study auctions for selling a limited supply of a single commodity in the case where the supply is known in advance and the case it is unknown and must be instead allocated in an online fashion. The latter variant was proposed by Mahdian and Saberi [12] as a model of an important phenomena in auctions for selling Internet advertising: advertising impressions must be allocated as they arrive and the total quantity available is unknown in advance. We describe the Bayesian optimal mechanism for these variants and extend the random sampling auction of Goldberg et al. [8] to address the prior-free case. Categories and Subject Descriptors F.2.m [ANALYSIS OF ALGORITHMS AND PROBLEM COMPLEXITY]: Miscellaneous General Terms Algorithms, Economics Keywords Online, Auctions, Prior-free, Mechanism design, Limited supply

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGECOM
• Authors: Nikhil R. Devanur, Jason D. Hartline
• Keywords: Auction, Bayesian Optimal Mechanism, Information Management, Limited Supply, SIGECOM 2009