Leveraging the Hints: Adaptive Bidding in Repeated First-Price Auctions

Understand

With the advent and increasing consolidation of e-commerce, digital advertising has very recently replaced traditional advertising as the main marketing force in the economy.

• In the past four years, a particularly important development in the digital advertising industry is the shift from second-price auctions to first-price auctions for online display ads.
• This shift immediately motivated the intellectually challenging question of how to bid in first-price auctions, because unlike in second-price auctions, bidding one's private value truthfully is no longer optimal.
• Following a series of recent works in this area, we consider a differentiated setup: we do not make any assumption about other bidders' maximum bid (i.e.