Price of Anarchy in Adword Auctions

In this talk we consider the quality of equilibria in Generalized Second Price Auction, a simple model of auctions widely used in the newly developing markets for search advertising . It is known that in the full information model, the Generalized Second Price Auction has socially optimal Nash equilibria (i.e., that the Price of Stability is 1), but not all equilibria are optimal. Even worse, in the Bayesian setting socially optimal Nash equilibria may not exists . In this talk we will show that under some mild assumptions, the price of anarchy is of this game is small both in the full information and in the Bayesian settings. The results are joint work with Renato Paes Leme.

Speaker Details

Eva Tardos is a Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University, and was department chair 2006-2010. She received her PhD from Eotvos University, Budapest. Her research interest is algorithms and algorithmic game theory, the subarea theory of designing systems and algorithms for selfish users. Her research focuses on algorithms and games on networks. She has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including the Packard Fellowship, the Fulkerson Prize and the Dantzig prize. She editor of several other journals, including the Journal of the ACM, and Combinatorica.

Date:
Speakers:
Eva Tardos
Affiliation:
Cornell