Candidate Talk: On Best-Response Bidding in Ad Auctions

A fundamental problem faced by advertisers bidding for slots in a keyword auction is how to bid so as to maximize their profit. In this talk, we describe and analyze a class of best-response bidding strategies for a repeated auction on a single keyword. These bidding strategies are simple and easily implementable, and also, as we show, achieve several desirable criteria for the advertisers. In the talk, we describe our theoretical and empirical results on the revenue, convergence and robustness properties of these strategies. We assume no prior technical knowledge and all the game theoretic concepts required will be introduced during the talk.

Joint work with M. Cary, A. Das, B. Edelman, K. Heimerl, A. Karlin, C. Mathieu and M. Schwarz

Speaker Details

Loannis Giotis has graduated (Diploma) from the Computer Engineering and Informatics Department of University of Patras, Greece in 2002. He received his M.Sc. degree from University of Washington on Approximation Algorithms. He is currently continuing his studies at University of Washington to obtain a Ph.D. degree with main research area in Game Theory. During his studies he has received the “College of Engineering Boeing Company Fellowship.”

Date:
Speakers:
Loannis Giotis
Affiliation:
University of Washington