Towards Efficient Auctions in an Auto-bidding World

Proceedings of The Web Conference (2021), 3965–3973

Abstract

Auto-bidding has become one of the main options for bidding in online advertisements, in which advertisers only need to specify high-level objectives and leave the complex task of bidding to auto-bidders. In this paper, we propose a family of auctions with boosts to improve welfare for auto-bidders with both return on ad spend constraints and budget constraints. Our empirical results validate our theoretical findings and show that both the welfare and revenue can be improved by selecting the weight of the boosts properly.