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Price Manipulability in First-Price Auctions

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

First-price auctions have many desirable properties, including uniquely possessing some, like credibility. However, first-price auctions are also inherently non-truthful, and non-truthfulness may result in instability and inefficiencies. Given these pros and cons, we seek to quantify the extent to which first-price auctions are susceptible to manipulation.
In this work we adopt a metric that was introduced in the context of bitcoin fee design markets: the percentage change in payment that can be achieved by being strategic. We study the behavior of this metric for single-unit and k-unit auction environments with n i.i.d. buyers, and seek conditions under which the percentage change tends to zero as n grows large.
To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first rigorous study of the extent to which large multi-unit first price auctions are susceptible to manipulation. We provide an almost complete picture of the conditions under which they are “truthful in the large,” and exhibit some surprising boundaries.

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  • (2023)Multi-Platform Budget Management in Ad Markets with Non-IC AuctionsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4476642Online publication date: 2023

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
        April 2022
        3764 pages
        ISBN:9781450390965
        DOI:10.1145/3485447
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        Published: 25 April 2022

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        Author Tags

        1. First-price auction
        2. approximate incentive compatibility
        3. strategyproofness in the large

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        April 25 - 29, 2022
        Virtual Event, Lyon, France

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        • (2023)Multi-Platform Budget Management in Ad Markets with Non-IC AuctionsSSRN Electronic Journal10.2139/ssrn.4476642Online publication date: 2023

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