Deterministic-Allocation and Anonymous Joint Advertising in E-commerce Platforms
About
With the advancement of machine learning, an increasing number of studies are employing automated mechanism design (AMD) methods for optimal auction design. However, all previous AMD architectures designed to generate optimal mechanisms that satisfy near dominant strategy incentive compatibility (DSIC) fail to achieve deterministic allocation, and some also lack anonymity, thereby impacting the efficiency and fairness of advertising allocation. This has resulted in a notable discrepancy between the previous AMD architectures for generating near-DSIC optimal mechanisms and the demands of real-world advertising scenarios. In this paper, we prove that in all online advertising scenarios, when all ad slots must be allocated, previous non-deterministic allocation AMD methods lead to the non-existence of feasible solutions in the vast majority of cases, resulting in a gap between the rounded solution and the optimal solution. Furthermore, we propose JTransNet, a transformer-based neural network architecture, designed for optimal deterministic-allocation and anonymous joint auction design. Although the deterministic allocation module in JTransNet is designed for the latest joint auction scenarios, it can be applied to other non-deterministic AMD architectures with minor modifications. Additionally, our offline and online data experiments demonstrate that, in joint auction scenarios, JTransNet significantly outperforms the considered baselines in terms of platform revenue.