Prompt mechanism for online auctions with multi-unit demands

Xiangzhong Xiang ()
Additional contact information
Xiangzhong Xiang: The University of Hong Kong

Journal of Combinatorial Optimization, 2015, vol. 30, issue 2, No 8, 335-346

Abstract: Abstract We study the following TV ad placement problem: $$m$$ m identical time-slots are on sale within a period of $$m$$ m days and only one time-slot is available each day. Advertisers arrive and depart online to bid for some time-slots to publish their ads. Typically, advertiser $$i$$ i arrives at the $$a_i$$ a i ’th day and wishes that her ad would be published for at most $$s_i$$ s i days before she departs. The goal is to maximize the social welfare which is the sum of values of the published ads. In this paper, we design a competitive online mechanism in which each advertiser is motivated to report her private value truthfully and can learn her payment at the very moment that she wins some time-slots. When all demands $$s_i$$ s i ’s are uniform, we prove that our mechanism achieves a non-trivial competitive ratio of $$5$$ 5 . We also study general cases and derive upper and lower bounds.

Keywords: Online auctions; Truthfulness; Promptness; Competitive ratio (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10878-014-9754-9 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:jcomop:v:30:y:2015:i:2:d:10.1007_s10878-014-9754-9

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/10878

DOI: 10.1007/s10878-014-9754-9

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Combinatorial Optimization is currently edited by Thai, My T.

More articles in Journal of Combinatorial Optimization from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().