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Documents authored by Li, Yingkai

Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.9
Making Auctions Robust to Aftermarkets

Authors: Moshe Babaioff, Nicole Immorlica, Yingkai Li, and Brendan Lucier

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 251, 14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023)

Abstract
A prevalent assumption in auction theory is that the auctioneer has full control over the market and that the allocation she dictates is final. In practice, however, agents might be able to resell acquired items in an aftermarket. A prominent example is the market for carbon emission allowances. These allowances are commonly allocated by the government using uniform-price auctions, and firms can typically trade these allowances among themselves in an aftermarket that may not be fully under the auctioneer’s control. While the uniform-price auction is approximately efficient in isolation, we show that speculation and resale in aftermarkets might result in a significant welfare loss. Motivated by this issue, we consider three approaches, each ensuring high equilibrium welfare in the combined market. The first approach is to adopt smooth auctions such as discriminatory auctions. This approach is robust to correlated valuations and to participants acquiring information about others' types. However, discriminatory auctions have several downsides, notably that of charging bidders different prices for identical items, resulting in fairness concerns that make the format unpopular. Two other approaches we suggest are either using posted-pricing mechanisms, or using uniform-price auctions with anonymous reserves. We show that when using balanced prices, both these approaches ensure high equilibrium welfare in the combined market. The latter also inherits many of the benefits from uniform-price auctions such as price discovery, and can be introduced with a minor modification to auctions currently in use to sell carbon emission allowances.
Cite as

Moshe Babaioff, Nicole Immorlica, Yingkai Li, and Brendan Lucier. Making Auctions Robust to Aftermarkets. In 14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 251, pp. 9:1-9:23, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)

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@InProceedings{babaioff_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.9,
  author =	{Babaioff, Moshe and Immorlica, Nicole and Li, Yingkai and Lucier, Brendan},
  title =	{{Making Auctions Robust to Aftermarkets}},
  booktitle =	{14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023)},
  pages =	{9:1--9:23},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-263-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{251},
  editor =	{Tauman Kalai, Yael},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.9},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-175122},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.9},
  annote =	{Keywords: carbon markets, aftermarkets, price of anarchy, multi-unit auctions, posted prices}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.52
Budget Pacing in Repeated Auctions: Regret and Efficiency Without Convergence

Authors: Jason Gaitonde, Yingkai Li, Bar Light, Brendan Lucier, and Aleksandrs Slivkins

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 251, 14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023)

Abstract
Online advertising via auctions increasingly dominates the marketing landscape. A typical advertiser may participate in thousands of auctions each day with bids tailored to a variety of signals about user demographics and intent. These auctions are strategically linked through a global budget constraint. To help address the difficulty of bidding, many major online platforms now provide automated budget management via a flexible approach called budget pacing: rather than bidding directly, an advertiser specifies a global budget target and a maximum willingness-to-pay for different types of advertising opportunities. The specified maximums are then scaled down (or "paced") by a multiplier so that the realized total spend matches the target budget. These automated bidders are now near-universally adopted across all mature advertising platforms, raising pressing questions about market outcomes that arise when advertisers use budget pacing simultaneously. In this paper we study the aggregate welfare and individual regret guarantees of dynamic pacing algorithms in repeated auctions with budgets. We show that when agents simultaneously use a natural form of gradient-based pacing, the liquid welfare obtained over the course of the dynamics is at least half the optimal liquid welfare obtainable by any allocation rule, matching the best possible bound for static auctions even in pure Nash equilibria [Aggarwal et al., WINE 2019; Babaioff et al., ITCS 2021]. In contrast to prior work, these results hold without requiring convergence of the dynamics, circumventing known computational obstacles of finding equilibria [Chen et al., EC 2021]. Our result is robust to the correlation structure among agents' valuations and holds for any core auction, a broad class that includes first-price, second-price, and GSP auctions. We complement the aggregate guarantees by showing that an agent using such pacing algorithms achieves an O(T^{3/4}) regret relative to the value obtained by the best fixed pacing multiplier in hindsight in stochastic bidding environments. Compared to past work, this result applies to more general auctions and extends to adversarial settings with respect to dynamic regret.
Cite as

Jason Gaitonde, Yingkai Li, Bar Light, Brendan Lucier, and Aleksandrs Slivkins. Budget Pacing in Repeated Auctions: Regret and Efficiency Without Convergence. In 14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 251, p. 52:1, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023)

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@InProceedings{gaitonde_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.52,
  author =	{Gaitonde, Jason and Li, Yingkai and Light, Bar and Lucier, Brendan and Slivkins, Aleksandrs},
  title =	{{Budget Pacing in Repeated Auctions: Regret and Efficiency Without Convergence}},
  booktitle =	{14th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2023)},
  pages =	{52:1--52:1},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-263-1},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2023},
  volume =	{251},
  editor =	{Tauman Kalai, Yael},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.52},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-175557},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2023.52},
  annote =	{Keywords: repeated auctions with budgets, pacing, learning in auctions}
}
Document
Brief Announcement
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2018.108
Brief Announcement: Bayesian Auctions with Efficient Queries

Authors: Jing Chen, Bo Li, Yingkai Li, and Pinyan Lu

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 107, 45th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2018)

Abstract
Generating good revenue is one of the most important problems in Bayesian auction design, and many (approximately) optimal dominant-strategy incentive compatible (DSIC) Bayesian mechanisms have been constructed for various auction settings. However, most existing studies do not consider the complexity for the seller to carry out the mechanism. It is assumed that the seller knows "each single bit" of the distributions and is able to optimize perfectly based on the entire distributions. Unfortunately this is a strong assumption and may not hold in reality: for example, when the value distributions have exponentially large supports or do not have succinct representations. In this work we consider, for the first time, the query complexity of Bayesian mechanisms. We only allow the seller to have limited oracle accesses to the players' value distributions, via quantile queries and value queries. For a large class of auction settings, we prove logarithmic lower-bounds for the query complexity for any DSIC Bayesian mechanism to be of any constant approximation to the optimal revenue. For single-item auctions and multi-item auctions with unit-demand or additive valuation functions, we prove tight upper-bounds via efficient query schemes, without requiring the distributions to be regular or have monotone hazard rate. Thus, in those auction settings the seller needs to access much less than the full distributions in order to achieve approximately optimal revenue.
Cite as

Jing Chen, Bo Li, Yingkai Li, and Pinyan Lu. Brief Announcement: Bayesian Auctions with Efficient Queries. In 45th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2018). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 107, pp. 108:1-108:4, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018)

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@InProceedings{chen_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2018.108,
  author =	{Chen, Jing and Li, Bo and Li, Yingkai and Lu, Pinyan},
  title =	{{Brief Announcement: Bayesian Auctions with Efficient Queries}},
  booktitle =	{45th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2018)},
  pages =	{108:1--108:4},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-076-7},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2018},
  volume =	{107},
  editor =	{Chatzigiannakis, Ioannis and Kaklamanis, Christos and Marx, D\'{a}niel and Sannella, Donald},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2018.108},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-91124},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2018.108},
  annote =	{Keywords: The complexity of Bayesian mechanisms, quantile queries, value queries}
}
Document
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2017.11
Efficient Approximations for the Online Dispersion Problem

Authors: Jing Chen, Bo Li, and Yingkai Li

Published in: LIPIcs, Volume 80, 44th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2017)

Abstract
The dispersion problem has been widely studied in computational geometry and facility location, and is closely related to the packing problem. The goal is to locate n points (e.g., facilities or persons) in a k-dimensional polytope, so that they are far away from each other and from the boundary of the polytope. In many real-world scenarios however, the points arrive and depart at different times, and decisions must be made without knowing future events. Therefore we study, for the first time in the literature, the online dispersion problem in Euclidean space. There are two natural objectives when time is involved: the all-time worst-case (ATWC) problem tries to maximize the minimum distance that ever appears at any time; and the cumulative distance (CD) problem tries to maximize the integral of the minimum distance throughout the whole time interval. Interestingly, the online problems are highly non-trivial even on a segment. For cumulative distance, this remains the case even when the problem is time-dependent but offline, with all the arriving and departure times given in advance. For the online ATWC problem on a segment, we construct a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm which is (2ln2+epsilon)-competitive, where epsilon>0 can be arbitrarily small and the algorithm's running time is polynomial in 1/epsilon. We show this algorithm is actually optimal. For the same problem in a square, we provide a 1.591-competitive algorithm and a 1.183 lower-bound. Furthermore, for arbitrary k-dimensional polytopes with k>=2, we provide a 2/(1-epsilon)-competitive algorithm and a 7/6 lower-bound. All our lower-bounds come from the structure of the online problems and hold even when computational complexity is not a concern. Interestingly, for the offline CD problem in arbitrary k-dimensional polytopes, we provide a polynomial-time black-box reduction to the online ATWC problem, and the resulting competitive ratio increases by a factor of at most 2. Our techniques also apply to online dispersion problems with different boundary conditions.
Cite as

Jing Chen, Bo Li, and Yingkai Li. Efficient Approximations for the Online Dispersion Problem. In 44th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 80, pp. 11:1-11:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2017)

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@InProceedings{chen_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2017.11,
  author =	{Chen, Jing and Li, Bo and Li, Yingkai},
  title =	{{Efficient Approximations for the Online Dispersion Problem}},
  booktitle =	{44th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2017)},
  pages =	{11:1--11:15},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-041-5},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2017},
  volume =	{80},
  editor =	{Chatzigiannakis, Ioannis and Indyk, Piotr and Kuhn, Fabian and Muscholl, Anca},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2017.11},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-74002},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2017.11},
  annote =	{Keywords: dispersion, online algorithms, geometric optimization, packing, competitive algorithms}
}
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