Mechanism Design for Ad Auctions with Display Prices
This work addresses a specific problem in online advertising platforms where price display affects auction design, offering incremental improvements by extending mechanism design to incorporate price information.
The paper tackles the problem of designing ad auctions where prices are displayed alongside ads, which influences both consumer decisions and advertiser bidding. It characterizes incentive-compatible auctions with display prices and derives welfare- and revenue-maximizing auctions for exogenous prices, while also analyzing equilibrium prices when advertisers strategize over display prices.
In many applications, ads are displayed together with the prices, so as to provide a direct comparison among similar products or services. The price-displaying feature not only influences the consumers' decisions, but also affects the advertisers' bidding behaviors. In this paper, we study ad auctions with display prices from the perspective of mechanism design, in which advertisers are asked to submit both the costs and prices of their products. We provide a characterization for all incentive compatible auctions with display prices, and use it to design auctions under two scenarios. In the former scenario, the display prices are assumed to be exogenously determined. For this setting, we derive the welfare-maximizing and revenue-maximizing auctions for any realization of the price profile. In the latter, advertisers are allowed to strategize display prices in their own interests. We investigate two families of allocation policies within the scenario and identify the equilibrium prices accordingly. Our results reveal that the display prices do affect the design of ad auctions and the platform can leverage such information to optimize the performance of ad delivery.