An Efficient Deep Distribution Network for Bid Shading in First-Price Auctions

作者：Tian Zhou, Hao He, Shengjun Pan, Niklas Karlsson, Bharatbhushan Shetty, Brendan Kitts, Djordje Gligorijevic, San Gultekin, Tingyu Mao, Junwei Pan, Jianlong Zhang, Aaron Flores · 年份：2021 · DOI：10.1145/3447548.3467167 · 被引用次数：29 · 研究领域：Auction Theory and Applications、Consumer Market Behavior and Pricing、Advanced Bandit Algorithms Research

Since 2019, most ad exchanges and sell-side platforms (SSPs), in the online advertising industry, shifted from second to first price auctions. Due to the fundamental difference between these auctions, demand-side platforms (DSPs) have had to update their bidding strategies to avoid bidding unnecessarily high and hence overpaying. Bid shading was proposed to adjust the bid price intended for second-price auctions, in order to balance cost and winning probability in a first-price auction setup. In this study, we introduce a novel deep distribution network for optimal bidding in both open (non-censored) and closed (censored) online first-price auctions. Offline and online A/B testing results show that our algorithm outperforms previous state-of-art algorithms in terms of both surplus and effective cost per action (eCPX) metrics. Furthermore, the algorithm is optimized in run-time and has been deployed into VerizonMedia DSP as production algorithm, serving hundreds of billions of bid requests per day. Online A/B test shows that advertiser's ROI are improved by +2.4%, +2.4%, and +8.6% for impression based (CPM), click based (CPC), and conversion based (CPA) campaigns respectively.