Budget Pacing in Repeated Auctions: Regret and Efficiency without Convergence
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We study the aggregate welfare and individual regret guarantees of dynamic pacing algorithms in the context of repeated auctions with budgets. Such algorithms are commonly used as bidding agents in Internet advertising platforms, adaptively learning to shade bids in order to match a specified spend target. We show that when agents simultaneously apply a natural form of gradient-based pacing, the liquid welfare obtained over the course of the learning dynamics is at least half the optimal expected liquid welfare obtainable by any allocation rule. This result is robust to the correlation structure between agent valuations and holds for any core auction, a broad class of auctions that includes first-price, second-price, and generalized second-price auctions. Moreover, these results hold without requiring convergence of the dynamics, equilibrium while allowing us to circumvent known complexity-theoretic obstacles of finding equilibria. For individual guarantees, we further show such pacing algorithms enjoy dynamic regret bounds for individual value maximization, with respect to the sequence of budget-pacing bids, for any auction satisfying a monotone bang-for-buck property. This generalizes known regret guarantees for bidders facing stochastic bidding environments in two ways: it applies to a wider class of auctions than previously known, and it allows the environment to change over time
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