Abstract
We study the following TV ad placement problem: $$m$$m identical time-slots are on sale within a period of $$m$$m days and only one time-slot is available each day. Advertisers arrive and depart online to bid for some time-slots to publish their ads. Typically, advertiser $$i$$i arrives at the $$a_i$$ai'th day and wishes that her ad would be published for at most $$s_i$$si days before she departs. The goal is to maximize the social welfare which is the sum of values of the published ads. In this paper, we design a competitive online mechanism in which each advertiser is motivated to report her private value truthfully and can learn her payment at the very moment that she wins some time-slots. When all demands $$s_i$$si's are uniform, we prove that our mechanism achieves a non-trivial competitive ratio of $$5$$5. We also study general cases and derive upper and lower bounds.
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