Many online platforms act as intermediaries between a seller and a set of buyers. Examples of such settings include online retailers (such as Ebay) selling items on behalf of sellers to buyers, or advertising exchanges (such as AdX) selling pageviews on behalf of publishers to advertisers. In...

The second price auction has been the prevalent auction format used by advertising exchanges because of its simplicity and desirable incentive properties. However, even with an optimized choice of reserve prices, this auction is not revenue optimal when the bidders are heterogeneous and their...