Bidding Agent Design in the LinkedIn Ad Marketplace

We establish a general optimization framework for the design of automated bidding agent in dynamic online marketplaces. It optimizes solely for the buyer's interest and is agnostic to the auction mechanism imposed by the seller. As a result, the framework allows, for instance, the joint optimization of a group of ads across multiple platforms each running its own auction format. Bidding strategy derived from this framework automatically guarantees the optimality of budget allocation across ad units and platforms. Common constraints such as budget delivery schedule, return on investments and guaranteed results, directly translates to additional parameters in the bidding formula. We share practical learnings of the deployed bidding system in the LinkedIn ad marketplace based on this framework.

On the convergence of optimistic policy iteration for stochastic shortest path problem

In this paper, we prove some convergence results of a special case of optimistic policy iteration algorithm for stochastic shortest path problem. We consider both Monte Carlo and $TD(\lambda)$ methods for the policy evaluation step under the condition that the termination state will eventually be reached almost surely.