An Adaptive Proportional Value-per-Click Agent for Bidding in Ad Auctions

Sponsored search auctions constitutes the most important source of revenue for search engine companies, offering new opportunities for advertisers. The Trading Agent Competition (TAC) Ad Auctions tournament is one of the first attempts to study the competition among advertisers for their placement in sponsored positions along with organic search engine results. In this paper, we describe agent Mertacor, a simulation-based game theoretic agent coupled with on-line learning techniques to optimize its behavior that successfully competed in the 2010 tournament. In addition, we evaluate different facets of our agent to draw conclusions about certain aspects of its strategy.

[1]  Yevgeniy Vorobeychik,et al.  Simulation-Based Game Theoretic Analysis of Keyword Auctions with Low-Dimensional Bidding Strategies , 2009, UAI.

[2]  Yevgeniy Vorobeychik.  Simulation-based analysis of keyword auctions , 2009, SECO.

[3]  Xudong Luo,et al.  Designing a Successful Adaptive Agent for TAC Ad Auction , 2010, ECAI.

[4]  Jon Feldman,et al.  Algorithmic Methods for Sponsored Search Advertising , 2008, ArXiv.

[5]  Zhen Liu,et al.  Performance Modeling and Engineering , 2010 .

[6]  Yevgeniy Vorobeychik,et al.  A Game Theoretic Bidding Agent for the Ad Auction Game , 2011, ICAART.

[7]  Sébastien Lahaie,et al.  An analysis of alternative slot auction designs for sponsored search , 2006, EC '06.

[8]  Richard S. Sutton,et al.  Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction , 1998, IEEE Trans. Neural Networks.

[9]  Bernard J. Jansen,et al.  Sponsored search: an overview of the concept, history, and technology , 2008, Int. J. Electron. Bus..

[10]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  Practical Strategic Reasoning with Applications in Market Games , 2010 .

[11]  Peter Stone,et al.  TacTex09: a champion bidding agent for ad auctions , 2010, AAMAS.

[12]  Victor Naroditskiy,et al.  A Knapsack-Based Approach to Bidding in Ad Auctions , 2010, ECAI.

[13]  Martine De Cock,et al.  Born to trade: A genetically evolved keyword bidder for sponsored search , 2010, IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

[14]  Anna R. Karlin,et al.  On the Effects of Competing Advertisements in Keyword Auctions , 2008 .