TY - CONF T1 - On random sampling auctions for digital goods T2 - Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce Y1 - 2009 A1 - Alaei,Saeed A1 - Malekian,Azarakhsh A1 - Srinivasan, Aravind KW - auction KW - mechanism design KW - random sampling AB - In the context of auctions for digital goods, an interesting Random Sampling Optimal Price auction (RSOP) has been proposed by Goldberg, Hartline and Wright; this leads to a truthful mechanism. Since random sampling is a popular approach for auctions that aims to maximize the seller's revenue, this method has been analyzed further by Feige, Flaxman, Hartline and Kleinberg, who have shown that it is 15-competitive in the worst case -- which is substantially better than the previously proved bounds but still far from the conjectured competitive ratio of 4. In this paper, we prove that RSOP is indeed 4-competitive for a large class of instances in which the number λ of bidders receiving the item at the optimal uniform price, is at least 6. We also show that it is 4.68 competitive for the small class of remaining instances thus leaving a negligible gap between the lower and upper bound. Furthermore, we develop a robust version of RSOP -- one in which the seller's revenue is, with high probability, not much below its mean -- when the above parameter λ grows large. We employ a mix of probabilistic techniques and dynamic programming to compute these bounds. JA - Proceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce T3 - EC '09 PB - ACM CY - New York, NY, USA SN - 978-1-60558-458-4 UR - http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1566374.1566402 M3 - 10.1145/1566374.1566402 ER -