Characterization of Incentive Compatibility of an Ex-Ante Constrained Player

Abstract

We consider a variant of the standard Bayesian mechanism, where players evaluate their outcomes and constraints in an ex-ante manner. Such a model captures a major form of modern online advertising where an advertiser is concerned with her/his expected utility over a time period and her/his type may change over time. We are interested in the incentive compatibility (IC) problem of such Bayesian mechanism. Under very mild conditions on the mechanism environments, we give a full characterization of IC via the taxation principle and show, perhaps surprisingly, that such IC mechanisms are fully characterized by the so-called auto-bidding mechanisms, which are pervasively fielded in the online advertising industry.

Cite

Text

Ni and Tang. "Characterization of Incentive Compatibility of an Ex-Ante Constrained Player." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2022. doi:10.1609/AAAI.V36I5.20450

Markdown

[Ni and Tang. "Characterization of Incentive Compatibility of an Ex-Ante Constrained Player." AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2022.](https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2022/ni2022aaai-characterization/) doi:10.1609/AAAI.V36I5.20450

BibTeX

@inproceedings{ni2022aaai-characterization,
  title     = {{Characterization of Incentive Compatibility of an Ex-Ante Constrained Player}},
  author    = {Ni, Bonan and Tang, Pingzhong},
  booktitle = {AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence},
  year      = {2022},
  pages     = {5156-5163},
  doi       = {10.1609/AAAI.V36I5.20450},
  url       = {https://mlanthology.org/aaai/2022/ni2022aaai-characterization/}
}