95 research outputs found
07271 Abstracts Collection -- Computational Social Systems and the Internet
From 01.07. to 06.07.2007, the Dagstuhl Seminar 07271 ``Computational Social Systems and the Internet\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl.
During the seminar, several participants presented their current
research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of
the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of
seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section
describes the seminar topics and goals in general.
Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available
Prophet Inequalities with Limited Information
In the classical prophet inequality, a gambler observes a sequence of
stochastic rewards and must decide, for each reward ,
whether to keep it and stop the game or to forfeit the reward forever and
reveal the next value . The gambler's goal is to obtain a constant
fraction of the expected reward that the optimal offline algorithm would get.
Recently, prophet inequalities have been generalized to settings where the
gambler can choose items, and, more generally, where he can choose any
independent set in a matroid. However, all the existing algorithms require the
gambler to know the distribution from which the rewards are
drawn.
The assumption that the gambler knows the distribution from which
are drawn is very strong. Instead, we work with the much simpler
assumption that the gambler only knows a few samples from this distribution. We
construct the first single-sample prophet inequalities for many settings of
interest, whose guarantees all match the best possible asymptotically,
\emph{even with full knowledge of the distribution}. Specifically, we provide a
novel single-sample algorithm when the gambler can choose any elements
whose analysis is based on random walks with limited correlation. In addition,
we provide a black-box method for converting specific types of solutions to the
related \emph{secretary problem} to single-sample prophet inequalities, and
apply it to several existing algorithms. Finally, we provide a constant-sample
prophet inequality for constant-degree bipartite matchings.
We apply these results to design the first posted-price and multi-dimensional
auction mechanisms with limited information in settings with asymmetric
bidders
The Power of Verification for Greedy Mechanism Design
Greedy algorithms are known to provide, in polynomial time, near optimal approximation guarantees for Combinatorial Auctions (CAs) with multidimensional bidders. It is known that truthful greedy-like mechanisms for CAs with multi-minded bidders do not achieve good approximation guarantees.
In this work, we seek a deeper understanding of greedy mechanism design and investigate under which general assumptions, we can have efficient and truthful greedy mechanisms for CAs. Towards this goal, we use the framework of priority algorithms and weak and strong verification, where the bidders are not allowed to overbid on their winning set or on any subset of this set, respectively. We provide a complete characterization of the power of weak verification showing that it is sufficient and necessary for any greedy fixed priority algorithm to become truthful with the use of money or not, depending on the ordering of the bids. Moreover, we show that strong verification is sufficient and necessary to obtain a 2-approximate truthful mechanism with money, based on a known greedy algorithm, for the problem of submodular CAs in finite bidding domains. Our proof is based on an interesting structural analysis of the strongly connected components of the declaration graph
Truthful Auctions for Automated Bidding in Online Advertising
Automated bidding, an emerging intelligent decision making paradigm powered
by machine learning, has become popular in online advertising. Advertisers in
automated bidding evaluate the cumulative utilities and have private financial
constraints over multiple ad auctions in a long-term period. Based on these
distinct features, we consider a new ad auction model for automated bidding:
the values of advertisers are public while the financial constraints, such as
budget and return on investment (ROI) rate, are private types. We derive the
truthfulness conditions with respect to private constraints for this
multi-dimensional setting, and demonstrate any feasible allocation rule could
be equivalently reduced to a series of non-decreasing functions on budget.
However, the resulted allocation mapped from these non-decreasing functions
generally follows an irregular shape, making it difficult to obtain a
closed-form expression for the auction objective. To overcome this design
difficulty, we propose a family of truthful automated bidding auction with
personalized rank scores, similar to the Generalized Second-Price (GSP)
auction. The intuition behind our design is to leverage personalized rank
scores as the criteria to allocate items, and compute a critical ROI to
transform the constraints on budget to the same dimension as ROI. The
experimental results demonstrate that the proposed auction mechanism
outperforms the widely used ad auctions, such as first-price auction and
second-price auction, in various automated bidding environments
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