Individually-Fair Auctions for Multi-Slot Sponsored Search
We design fair sponsored search auctions that achieve a near-optimal tradeoff between fairness and quality. Our work builds upon the model and auction design of Chawla and Jagadeesan <cit.>, who considered the special case of a single slot. We consider sponsored search settings with multiple slots and the standard model of click through rates that are multiplicatively separable into an advertiser-specific component and a slot-specific component. When similar users have similar advertiser-specific click through rates, our auctions achieve the same near-optimal tradeoff between fairness and quality as in <cit.>. When similar users can have different advertiser-specific preferences, we show that a preference-based fairness guarantee holds. Finally, we provide a computationally efficient algorithm for computing payments for our auctions as well as those in previous work, resolving another open direction from <cit.>.
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