Real-time bidding (RTB) is almost the most important mechanism in online display advertising, where proper bid for each page view plays a vital and essential role for good marketing results. Budget constrained bidding is a typical scenario in RTB mechanism where the advertisers hope to maximize total value of winning impressions under a pre-set budget constraint. However, the optimal strategy i...

Two-player games on graphs are widely studied in formal methods as they model the interaction between a system and its environment. The game is played by moving a token throughout a graph to produce an infinite path. There are several common modes to determine how the players move the token through the graph; e.g., in turn-based games the players alternate turns in moving the token. We study th...

With a large-scale introduction of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), a new entity, the PEV fleet aggregator, is expected to be responsible for managing the charging of, and for purchasing electricity for, the vehicles. This book chapter deals with the problem of an aggregator bidding into the day-ahead electricity market with the objective of minimizing charging costs while satisfying the PEVs’...

Designing efficient bidding strategies for agents participating in multiple, sequential auctions remains an important challenge for researchers in agentmediated electronic markets. The problem is particularly hard if the bidding agents have complementary (i.e. super-additive) utilities for the items being auctioned, such as is often the case in distributed transportation logistics. This paper s...

A strategy commonly observed in Internet auctions is that of “jump bidding,” or entering a bid larger than what is necessary to be a currently winning bidder. In this paper, we argue that the cost associated with entering online bids and the uncertainty about future entry—both of which distinguish Internet from live auctions—can explain this behavior. We present a simple theoretical model that ...

This paper studies shill bidding in the VCG mechanism applied to combinatorial auctions. Shill bidding is a strategy whereby a single decision-maker enters the auction under the guise of multiple identities (Sakurai et al. 1999). I formulate the problem of optimal shill bidding for a bidder who knows the aggregate bid of her opponents. A key to the analysis is a subproblem–the cost minimization...

T paper analyzes sequential auctioning of single units of an indivisible good to a fluctuating population composed of overlapping generations of unit-demand bidders. Two phenomena emergent in such a market are investigated: forward-looking bidding strategies, and closed-loop selling strategies that involve learning from past prices. The buyers shade their bids down, i.e., bid less than they wou...

As infrastructure-as-a-service clouds become more popular, cloud providers face the complicated problem of maximizing their resource utilization by handling the dynamics of user demand. Auction-based pricing, such as Amazon EC2 spot pricing, provides an option for users to use idle resources at highly reduced yet dynamic prices; under such a pricing scheme, users place bids for cloud resources,...

The popularity of online auctioning has grown meteorically since the late 90s. This attraction is due to their convenience, low cost and ability to reach large (even worldwide) audiences. However, despite the advantages there are many problems inherent in auctioning online. One such problem is shill bidding where spurious bids are introduced into an auction to drive up the final price for the s...