Learning Optimal Reserve Price against Non-myopic Bidders

Series
ACO Student Seminar
Time
Friday, January 10, 2020 - 1:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 005
Speaker
Jinyan Liu – University of Hong Kong – jyliu678@gmail.com
Organizer
He Guo

We consider the problem of learning optimal reserve price in repeated auctions against non- myopic bidders, who may bid strategically in order to gain in future rounds even if the single- round auctions are truthful. Previous algorithms, e.g., empirical pricing, do not provide non- trivial regret rounds in this setting in general. We introduce algorithms that obtain a small regret against non-myopic bidders either when the market is large, i.e., no single bidder appears in more than a small constant fraction of the rounds, or when the bidders are impatient, i.e., they discount future utility by some factor mildly bounded away from one. Our approach carefully controls what information is revealed to each bidder, and builds on techniques from differentially private online learning as well as the recent line of works on jointly differentially private algorithms.