On the competitive ratio of online sampling auctions

  • Authors:
  • Elias Koutsoupias;George Pierrakos

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Athens;UC Berkeley

  • Venue:
  • WINE'10 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Internet and network economics
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We study online profit-maximizing auctions for digital goods with adversarial bid selection and uniformly random arrivals. Our goal is to design auctions that are constant competitive with F(2); in this sense our model lies at the intersection of prior-free mechanism design and secretary problems. We first give a generic reduction that transforms any offline auction to an online one, with only a loss of a factor of 2 in the competitive ratio; we then present some natural auctions, both randomized and deterministic, and study their competitive ratio; our analysis reveals some interesting connections of one of these auctions with RSOP, which we further investigate in our final section.