• Home
  • Joint Value Estimation and Bidding in Repeated First-price Auctions - NUS Business School
Joint Value Estimation and Bidding in Repeated First-price Auctions
In "Seminars and talks"

Speakers

Yuxiao Wen
Yuxiao Wen

New York University

Yuxiao Wen is a Computer Science PhD candidate at New York University. He is in his fifth year under the supervision of Yanjun Han and Zhengyuan Zhou. His research focuses on the theory of online learning and its applications in operations research and revenue management.


Date:
Friday, 12 December 2025
Time:
10:00 am - 11:30 am
Venue:
NUS Business School
Mochtar Riady Building BIZ1 03-02
15 Kent Ridge Drive
Singapore 119245 (Map)

Abstract

We study regret minimization in repeated first-price auctions (FPAs), where a bidder observes only the realized outcome after each auction—win or loss. This setup reflects practical scenarios in online display advertising where the actual value of an impression depends on the difference between two potential outcomes, such as clicks or conversion rates, when the auction is won versus lost. We incorporate causal inference into this framework and analyze the challenging case where only the treatment effect admits a simple dependence on observable features. Under this framework, we propose algorithms that jointly estimate private values and optimize bidding strategies under two different feedback types on the highest other bid (HOB): the full-information feedback where the HOB is always revealed, and the binary feedback where the bidder only observes the win-loss indicator. Under both cases, our algorithms are shown to achieve near-optimal regret bounds. Notably, our framework enjoys a unique feature that the treatments are actively chosen, and hence eliminates the need for the overlap condition commonly required in causal inference.