Multi-Channel Auction Design in the Autobidding World

Abstract

Over the past few years, more and more Internet advertisers have started using automated bidding for optimizing their advertising campaigns. Such advertisers have an optimization goal (e.g. to maximize conversions), and some constraints (e.g. a budget or an upper bound on average cost per conversion), and the automated bidding system optimizes their auction bids on their behalf. Often, these advertisers participate on multiple advertising channels and try to optimize across these channels. A central question that remains unexplored is how automated bidding affects optimal auction design in the multi-channel setting. In this paper, we study the problem of setting auction reserve prices in the multi-channel setting. In particular, we shed light on the revenue implications of whether each channel optimizes its reserve price locally, or whether the channels optimize them globally to maximize total revenue. Motivated by practice, we consider two models: one in which the channels have full freedom to set reserve prices, and another in which the channels have to respect floor prices set by the publisher. We show that in the first model, welfare and revenue loss from local optimization is bounded by a function of the advertisers' inputs, but is independent of the number of channels and bidders. In stark contrast, we show that the revenue from local optimization could be arbitrarily smaller than those from global optimization in the second model.