7 research outputs found
Selling to a No-Regret Buyer
We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item
to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known
distribution in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully
rational and will perfectly reason about how their bids today affect the
seller's decisions tomorrow. In this work we initiate a different direction:
the buyer simply runs a no-regret learning algorithm over possible bids. We
provide a fairly complete characterization of optimal auctions for the seller
in this domain. Specifically:
- If the buyer bids according to EXP3 (or any "mean-based" learning
algorithm), then the seller can extract expected revenue arbitrarily close to
the expected welfare. This auction is independent of the buyer's valuation ,
but somewhat unnatural as it is sometimes in the buyer's interest to overbid. -
There exists a learning algorithm such that if the buyer bids
according to then the optimal strategy for the seller is simply
to post the Myerson reserve for every round. - If the buyer bids according
to EXP3 (or any "mean-based" learning algorithm), but the seller is restricted
to "natural" auction formats where overbidding is dominated (e.g. Generalized
First-Price or Generalized Second-Price), then the optimal strategy for the
seller is a pay-your-bid format with decreasing reserves over time. Moreover,
the seller's optimal achievable revenue is characterized by a linear program,
and can be unboundedly better than the best truthful auction yet simultaneously
unboundedly worse than the expected welfare
Robust Repeated Auctions under Heterogeneous Buyer Behavior
We study revenue optimization in a repeated auction between a single seller
and a single buyer. Traditionally, the design of repeated auctions requires
strong modeling assumptions about the bidder behavior, such as it being myopic,
infinite lookahead, or some specific form of learning behavior. Is it possible
to design mechanisms which are simultaneously optimal against a multitude of
possible buyer behaviors? We answer this question by designing a simple
state-based mechanism that is simultaneously approximately optimal against a
-lookahead buyer for all , a buyer who is a no-regret learner, and a
buyer who is a policy-regret learner. Against each type of buyer our mechanism
attains a constant fraction of the optimal revenue attainable against that type
of buyer. We complement our positive results with almost tight impossibility
results, showing that the revenue approximation tradeoffs achieved by our
mechanism for different lookahead attitudes are near-optimal