Preferred Deals in General EnvironmentsPreferred Deals • August 5th, 2019
A preferred deal is a special contract for selling im- pressions of display ad inventory. By accepting a deal, a buyer agrees to buy a minimum amount of impressions at a fixed price per impression, and is granted priority access to the impressions before they are sent to an open auction on an ad exchange. We consider the problem of designing preferred deals (inventory, price, quantity) in the presence of general convex constraints, including budget con- straints, and propose an approximation algorithm to maximize the revenue obtained from the deals. We then evaluate our algorithm using auction data from a major advertising exchange and our empiri- cal results show that the algorithm achieves around 95% of the optimal revenue.
