Testing Incentive Compatibility in Display Ad Auctions

Consider a buyer participating in a repeated auction, such as those
prevalent in display advertising. How would she test whether the
auction is incentive compatible? To bid effectively, she is
interested in whether the auction is single-shot incentive
compatible---a pure second-price auction, with fixed reserve
price---and also dynamically incentive compatible---her bids
are not used to set future reserve prices. In this work we develop
tests based on simple bid perturbations that a buyer can use to
answer these questions, with a focus on dynamic incentive
compatibility.



There are many potential A/B testing setups that one could use, but
we find that many natural experimental designs are, in fact, flawed.
For instance, we show that additive perturbations can lead to paradoxical results,
where higher bids lead to lower optimal reserve prices. We precisely
characterize this phenomenon and show that reserve prices are only
guaranteed to be monotone for distributions satisfying the Monotone
Hazard Rate (MHR) property. The experimenter must also decide how to split traffic to apply
systematic perturbations. It is tempting to have this split be
randomized, but we demonstrate empirically that unless the perturbations are
aligned with the partitions used by the seller to compute
reserve prices, the results are guaranteed to be inconclusive.



We validate our results with experiments on real display auction
data and show that a buyer can quantify both single-shot and dynamic
incentive compatibility even under realistic conditions where only
the cost of the impression is observed (as opposed to the exact
reserve price). We analyze the cost of running such experiments,
exposing trade-offs between test accuracy, cost, and underlying
market dynamics.

• Economics and Electronic Commerce

• Algorithms and Theory