A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Method for Impression Allocation in Online Display Advertising

Understand

In online display advertising, guaranteed contracts and real-time bidding (RTB) are two major ways to sell impressions for a publisher.

• Despite the increasing popularity of RTB, there is still half of online display advertising revenue generated from guaranteed contracts.
• Therefore, simultaneously selling impressions through both guaranteed contracts and RTB is a straightforward choice for a publisher to maximize its yield.
• However, deriving the optimal strategy to allocate impressions is not a trivial task, especially when the environment is unstable in real-world applications.