组织经济学seminar第149期

题目：Optimal Mechanisms for a Value Maximizer: The Futility of Screening Targets(价值最大化者的最优机制：筛选目标的徒劳)

时间：2024年10月15日14:00-15:00

地点：教学二楼2114

汇报人：左淞（谷歌高级研究员）

主持人：邝仲弘（中国人民大学经济学院副教授）

摘要：Motivated by the increased adoption of autobidding algorithms in internet advertising markets, we study the design of optimal mechanisms for selling an item to a value-maximizing buyer with a return-on-spend constraint. The buyer's values and target ratio in the returnon-spend constraint are private. We restrict attention to deterministic sequential screening mechanisms that can be implemented as a menu of two-part tariffs. The main result of this paper is to provide a characterization of an optimal mechanism. Surprisingly, we show that the optimal mechanism does not require target screening, i.e., offering a single two-part tariff is optimal for the seller. The optimal mechanism is a subsidized two-part tariff that provides a lump-sum subsidy to the buyer to encourage participation and then charges a fixed unit price for each item sold. The seller's problem is a challenging non-linear mechanism design problem, and a key technical contribution of our work is to provide a novel approach to analyzing non-linear pricing contracts for constrained buyers. Our results have valuable implications for advertising platforms seeking to personalize pricing decisions based on advertisers' characteristics.

个人简介：左淞，谷歌研究科学家。他的主要研究领域为机制设计、互联网广告拍卖与自动竞价。他曾获得2017年谷歌博士奖学金。2018年，左淞从清华大学交叉信息研究院“姚班”毕业，并获得博士学位。