Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation最新文献

{"title":"Welfare-maximizing Guaranteed Dashboard Mechanisms","authors":"Yuan Deng, Jason D. Hartline, Jieming Mao, Balasubramanian Sivan","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3858104","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3858104","url":null,"abstract":"Bidding dashboards are used in online marketplaces to aid a bidder in computing good bidding strategies, particularly when the auction used by the marketplace is constrained to have the winners-pay-bid payment format. A dashboard predicts the outcome a bidder can expect to get at each possible bid. To convince a bidder to best respond to the information published in a dashboard, a dashboard mechanism should ensure either (a) that best responding maximizes the bidder's utility (a weaker requirement) or (b) that the mechanism implements the outcome published in the dashboard (a stronger requirement that subsumes (a)). Recent work by Hartline et al. EC'19 formalized the notion of dashboard mechanisms and designed winners-pay-bid mechanisms that guaranteed epsilon-optimal utility (an epsilon-approximate version of (a)), but not (b). I.e., the mechanism could end up implementing arbitrarily different outcomes from what was promised. While this guarantee is sufficient from a purely technical perspective, it is far from enough in the real world: it is hard to convince bidders to best respond to information which could be arbitrarily inaccurate, regardless of the theoretical promise of near-optimality. In this paper we study guaranteed dashboard mechanisms, namely, ones that are guaranteed to implement what they publish, and obtain good welfare. We study this question in a repeated auction setting for general single-dimensional valuations and give tight characterizations of the loss in welfare as a function of natural parameters upper bounding the difference in valuation profile across the rounds. In particular, we give three different characterizations, bounding the loss in welfare in terms of the 0 norm, 1 norm and infinite norm of difference in valuation profile across rounds. All the characterizations generalize at least up to matroid feasibility constraints, and the infinite norm characterization extends to general downward-closed feasibility constraints. We bring to bear different techniques for each of these characterizations, including connections to differential privacy and online convex optimizations.","PeriodicalId":395676,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":"26 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133169454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Landscape of Auto-bidding Auctions: Value versus Utility Maximization","authors":"S. Balseiro, Yuan Deng, Jieming Mao, V. Mirrokni, Song Zuo","doi":"10.1145/3465456.3467607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3465456.3467607","url":null,"abstract":"Internet advertisers are increasingly adopting automated bidders to buy advertising opportunities. Automated bidders simplify the procurement process by allowing advertisers to specify their goals and then bidding on their behalf in the auctions that are used to sell advertising slots. One popular goal adopted by advertisers is to maximize their clicks (or conversions) subject to a return on spend (RoS) constraint, which imposes that the ratio of total value to total spend is greater than a target ratio specified by the advertisers. The emergence of automated bidders brings into question whether the standard mechanisms used to sell ads are still effective in this new landscape. Thus motivated, in this paper, we study the problem of characterizing optimal mechanisms for selling an item to one of multiple agents with return on spend constraints when either the values or target ratios are private. We consider two objectives for the agents: value maximization, which is becoming the prevalent objective in advertising markets, and utility maximization, which is the de facto paradigm in economic theory. Our goal is to understand the impact of the agents' private information and their objectives on the seller's revenue, and determine whether the first-best revenue, which is the optimal revenue when all the private information is public, is achievable. We show that first-best revenue is achievable for value-maximizing buyers when either the target ratio or the values are private, but not when both are private. In the case of utility-maximizing buyers, first-best is never achievable and we characterize revenue-maximizing mechanisms.","PeriodicalId":395676,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":"116 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124215956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Efficient, Fair, and Incentive-Compatible Healthcare Rationing","authors":"H. Aziz, F. Brandl","doi":"10.1145/3465456.3467531","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3465456.3467531","url":null,"abstract":"During the COVID-19 pandemic, fair and efficient rationing of healthcare resources has emerged as an important issue that has been discussed by medical experts, policy-makers, and the general public. We consider a healthcare rationing problem where medical units are to be allocated to patients. Each unit is reserved for one of several categories and the patients have different priorities for the categories. We present an allocation rule that respects the priorities, complies with the eligibility requirements, allocates the largest feasible number of units, and does not incentivize agents to hide that they qualify through a category. Moreover, the rule is polynomial-time computable. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first known rule with the aforementioned properties.","PeriodicalId":395676,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":"41 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132735856","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fair Dynamic Rationing","authors":"V. Manshadi, Rad Niazadeh, Scott Rodilitz","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3775895","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3775895","url":null,"abstract":"We study the allocative challenges that governmental and nonprofit organizations face when tasked with equitable and efficient rationing of a social good among agents whose needs (demands) realize sequentially and are possibly correlated. As one example, early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Federal Emergency Management Agency faced overwhelming, temporally scattered, a priori uncertain, and correlated demands for medical supplies from different states. To better achieve their dual aims of equity and efficiency in such contexts, social planners intend to maximize the minimum fill rate across agents, where each agent's fill rate must be irrevocably decided upon its arrival. For an arbitrarily correlated sequence of demands, we establish upper bounds on both the expected minimum fill rate (ex-post fairness) and the minimum expected fill rate (ex-ante fairness) achievable by any policy. Our bounds are parameterized by the number of agents and the expected demand-to-supply ratio, and they shed light on the limits of attaining equity in dynamic rationing. Further, we show that for any set of parameters, a simple adaptive policy of projected proportional allocation achieves the best possible fairness guarantee, ex post as well as ex ante. Our policy is transparent and easy to implement, as it does not rely on distributional information beyond the first conditional moments. Despite its simplicity, we demonstrate that this policy provides significant improvement over the class of non-adaptive target-fill-rate policies by characterizing the performance of the optimal such policy, which relies on full distributional knowledge. We obtain the performance guarantees of (i) our proposed adaptive policy by inductively designing lower-bound functions on its corresponding value-to-go, and (ii) the optimal target-fill-rate policy by establishing an intriguing connection to a monopoly-pricing optimization problem. Further, we extend our results to considering alternative objective functions and to rationing multiple types of resources. We complement our theoretical developments with a numerical study motivated by the rationing of COVID-19 medical supplies based on a projected-demand model used by the White House. In such a setting, our simple adaptive policy significantly outperforms its theoretical guarantee as well as the optimal target-fill-rate policy.","PeriodicalId":395676,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128128227","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Optimal Disclosure of Information to a Privately Informed Receiver","authors":"Ozan Candogan, P. Strack","doi":"10.1145/3465456.3467561","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3465456.3467561","url":null,"abstract":"We study information design problems where the designer controls information about a state and the receiver is privately informed about his preferences. The receiver's action set is general and his preferences depend linearly on the state. We show that to optimally screen the receiver, the designer can use a menu of \"laminar partitional\" signals. These signals partition the states such that the same message is sent in each partition element and the convex hulls of any two partition elements are either nested or have an empty intersection. Furthermore, each state is either perfectly revealed or lies in an interval in which at most n+2 different messages are sent, where n is the number of receiver types. In the finite action case an optimal menu can be obtained by solving a finite-dimensional convex program. Along the way we shed light on the solutions of optimization problems over distributions subject to a mean-preserving contraction constraint and additional constraints which might be of independent interest.","PeriodicalId":395676,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":"38 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128182987","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evolutionarily Stable (Mis)specifications: Theory and Applications","authors":"Kevin He, Jonathan Libgober","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3914870","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3914870","url":null,"abstract":"We introduce an evolutionary framework to evaluate competing (mis)specifications in strategic situations, focusing on which misspecifications can persist over a correct specification. Agents with heterogeneous specifications coexist in a society and repeatedly match against random opponents to play a stage game. They draw Bayesian inferences about the environment based on personal experience, so their learning depends on the distribution of specifications and matching assortativity in the society. One specification is evolutionarily stable against another if, whenever sufficiently prevalent, its adherents obtain higher expected objective payoffs than their counterparts. The learning channel leads to novel stability phenomena compared to frameworks where the heritable unit of cultural transmission is a single belief instead of a specification (i.e., set of feasible beliefs). We apply the framework to linear-quadratic-normal games where players receive correlated signals but possibly misperceive the information structure. The correct specification is not evolutionarily stable against a correlational error, whose direction depends on matching assortativity. As another application, the framework also endogenizes coarse analogy classes in centipede games. The full paper can be found at https://kevinhe.net/papers/theory_evolution.pdf","PeriodicalId":395676,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":"35 7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125725919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sequential Naive Learning","authors":"Itai Arieli, Y. Babichenko, Manuel Mueller-Frank","doi":"10.1145/3465456.3467537","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3465456.3467537","url":null,"abstract":"We analyze boundedly rational updating from aggregate statistics in a model with binary actions and binary states. Agents each take an irreversible action in sequence after observing the unordered set of previous actions. Each agent first forms her prior based on the aggregate statistic, then incorporates her signal with the prior based on Bayes rule, and finally applies a decision rule that assigns a (mixed) action to each belief. If priors are formed according to a discretized DeGroot rule, then actions converge to the state (in probability), i.e., asymptotic learning, in any informative information structure if and only if the decision rule satisfies probability matching. This result generalizes to unspecified information settings where information structures differ across agents and agents know only the information structure generating their own signal. Also, the main result extends to the case of n states and n actions.","PeriodicalId":395676,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":"291 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114401068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Revenue Maximization and Learning in Products Ranking","authors":"Ningyuan Chen, Anran Li, Shuoguang Yang","doi":"10.1145/3465456.3467610","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3465456.3467610","url":null,"abstract":"Online retailing has seen steady growth over the last decade. According to the Digital Commerce (formerly Internet Retailer) analysis of the US Commerce Department's year-end retail data, online sales constituted 16% of all retail sales in 2019, and is forecast to reach higher levels in the next years due to the impact of COVID-19. For an online retailer, one of the most important decisions is the products' display positioning as it plays a crucial role in shaping customers' shopping behavior. Empirical evidence abounds. Baye et al. [2] find that a consumer's likelihood of purchasing from a firm is strongly related to the order in which the firm is listed on a webpage by a search engine. In the online advertising industry, it has been widely observed that ads placed higher on a webpage attract more clicks from consumers [1]. Given the importance of product ranking positions, the key question for online retailers is how to rank the products to maximize the revenue. The question cannot be answered definitively, unless we can characterize and quantify how exactly customers react to products ranked in different positions. There are a number of reasons to explain the so-called position bias. The first reason is the limited attention of consumers. Eyetracking experiments show that the users are less likely to examine results near the bottom of the list. Besides limited attention, a customer seems to be more likely to buy a product ranked at the top, even though there is another similar product below inside her attention span. What explains this phenomenon at the individual level? Craswell et al. [3] provide a second explanation to the position bias using experiments, which is related to the satisficing behavior of customers. In particular, the customer views product sequentially and directly proceeds to purchasing a product once the utility of the product exceeds an acceptable threshold. The remaining products in the attention span are thus never viewed. Thus, positioning a brand or product at a top position on a list can improve both consumer attention and consumer selection of the brand.","PeriodicalId":395676,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130271959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Optimal Queue Design","authors":"Yeon-Koo Che, Olivier Tercieux","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.3743663","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3743663","url":null,"abstract":"We study the optimal design of a queueing system when agents' arrival and servicing are governed by a general Markov process. The designer of the system chooses entry and exit rules for agents, their service priority---or queueing discipline---as well as their information, while ensuring that agents have incentives to follow the designer's recommendations not only to join the queue but more importantly to stay in the queue. Under a mild condition, the optimal mechanism has a cutoff structure---agents are induced to enter up to a certain queue length and no agents are to exit the queue once they enter the queue; the agents on the queue are served according to a first-come-first-served (FCFS) rule; and they are given no information throughout the process beyond the recommendations they receive from the designer. FCFS is also necessary for optimality in a rich domain. We identify a novel role for queueing disciplines in regulating agents' beliefs, and their dynamic incentives, thus uncovering a hitherto unrecognized virtue of FCFS in this regard.","PeriodicalId":395676,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133435375","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Optimal Public Provision of Private Goods","authors":"Zi Yang Kang","doi":"10.1145/3465456.3467566","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3465456.3467566","url":null,"abstract":"How should a policymaker allocate a good to consumers via a public option when they are also able to purchase the good from a competitive private market? I consider a designer who has preferences over the outcomes of both the public option and the private market, but can design only the public option. However, her design affects the distribution of consumers who purchase in the private market---and hence equilibrium outcomes. I find that the optimal design involves rationing the public option with a small number of tiers, where the probability of allocation is constant in each tier. I derive first-order conditions that characterize how each tier should be set in the optimal design. Finally, I show that tiered rationing remains optimal under a variety of different assumptions.","PeriodicalId":395676,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133084887","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}