Coupon Design in Advertising Systems

Online platforms sell advertisements via auctions (e.g., VCG and GSP auction) and revenue maximization is one of the most important tasks for them. Many revenue increment methods are proposed, like reserve pricing, boosting, coupons and so on. The novelty of coupons rests on the fact that coupons are optional for advertisers while the others are compulsory. Recent studies on coupons have limited applications in advertising systems because they only focus on second price auctions and do not consider the combination with other methods. In this work, we study the coupon design problem for revenue maximization in the widely used VCG auction. Firstly, we examine the bidder strategies in the VCG auction with coupons. Secondly, we cast the coupon design problem into a learning framework and propose corresponding algorithms using the properties of VCG auction. Then we further study how to combine coupons with reserve pricing in our framework. Finally, extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithms based on both synthetic data and industrial data.