Liquid Welfare Guarantees for No-Regret Learning in Sequential Budgeted Auctions

Giannis Fikioris () and Éva Tardos ()
Additional contact information
Giannis Fikioris: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14850
Éva Tardos: Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14850

Mathematics of Operations Research, 2025, vol. 50, issue 2, 1233-1249

Abstract: We study the liquid welfare in sequential first-price auctions with budgeted buyers. We use a behavioral model for the buyers, assuming a learning style guarantee: the utility of each buyer is within a γ factor ( γ ≥ 1 ) of the utility achievable by shading their value with the same factor at each iteration. We show a γ + 1 / 2 + O ( 1 / γ ) price of anarchy for liquid welfare when valuations are additive. This is in stark contrast to sequential second-price auctions, where the resulting liquid welfare can be arbitrarily smaller than the maximum liquid welfare, even when γ = 1 . We prove a lower bound of γ on the liquid welfare loss under the given assumption in first-price auctions. Our liquid welfare results extend when buyers have submodular valuations over the set of items they win across iterations with a slightly worse price of anarchy bound of γ + 1 + O ( 1 / γ ) compared with the guarantee for the additive case.

Keywords: 91A06; 91A26; 91A50; 91B26; 68W27; sequential auction; online learning; liquid welfare; price of anarchy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/moor.2023.0274 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormoor:v:50:y:2025:i:2:p:1233-1249

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Mathematics of Operations Research from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().