Dynamic Mechanism Design in the Field

Abstract

Dynamic mechanisms are a powerful technique in designing revenue-maximizing repeated auctions. Despite their strength, these types of mechanisms have not been widely adopted in practice for several reasons, e.g., for their complexity, and for their sensitivity to the accuracy of predicting buyers' value distributions. In this paper, we aim to address these shortcomings and develop simple dynamic mechanisms that can be implemented efficiently, and provide theoretical guidelines for decreasing the sensitivity of dynamic mechanisms on prediction accuracy of buyers' value distributions. We prove that the dynamic mechanism we propose is provably dynamic incentive compatible, and introduce a notion of buyers' regret in dynamic mechanisms, and show that our mechanism achieves bounded regret while improving revenue and social welfare compared to a static reserve pricing policy. Finally, we confirm our theoretical analysis via an extensive empirical study of our dynamic auction on real data sets from online adverting. For example, we show our dynamic mechanisms can provide a 17% revenue lift with relative regret less than 0.2%.