Fast Rate Learning in Stochastic First Price Bidding
Résumé
First-price auctions have largely replaced traditional bidding
approaches based on Vickrey auctions in programmatic advertising.
As far as learning is concerned, first-price auctions are more
challenging because the optimal bidding strategy does not only
depend on the value of the item but also requires some knowledge of
the other bids.
They have already given rise to several works in sequential
learning,
many of which consider models for which the value of the buyer or
the opponents' maximal bid is chosen in an adversarial manner. Even
in the simplest settings, this gives rise to algorithms whose regret
grows as $\sqrt{T}$ with respect to the time horizon $T$.
Focusing on the case where the buyer plays against a stationary
stochastic environment, we show how to achieve significantly lower
regret: when the opponents' maximal bid distribution is known we
provide an algorithm whose regret can be as low as $\log^2(T)$; in
the case where the distribution must be learnt sequentially, a
generalization of this algorithm can achieve $T^{1/3+ \epsilon}$
regret, for any $\epsilon>0$.
To obtain these results, we introduce two novel ideas that can be of
interest in their own right. First, by transposing results obtained
in the posted price setting, we provide conditions under which the
first-price biding utility is locally quadratic around its
optimum. Second, we leverage the observation that, on small
sub-intervals, the concentration of the variations of the empirical
distribution function may be controlled more accurately than by
using the classical Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality.
Numerical simulations confirm that our algorithms converge much
faster than alternatives proposed in the literature for various bid
distributions, including for bids collected on an actual
programmatic advertising platform.
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