2023/10/04 by Yuan Deng, Mohammad Mahdian, Deng, Yuan +9 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Auction Theory and Applications #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Merger and Competition Analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2310.03105
openalex publication_date 2023/10/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the price of anarchy of the generalized second-price auction where bidders are value maximizers (i.e., autobidders). We show that in general the price of anarchy can be as bad as 0. For comparison, the price of anarchy of running VCG is 1/2 in the autobidding world. We further show a fined-grained price of anarchy with respect to the discount factors (i.e., the ratios of click probabilities between lower slots and the highest slot in each auction) in the generalized second-price auction, which highlights the qualitative relation between the smoothness of the discount factors and the efficiency of the generalized second-price auction.