GSP Autobidding Equilibria with Few Advertisers or Slots

Abstract

In sponsored-shopping auctions, one advertiser may win several positions, and a product that is never displayed may determine the prices of several winners. Under generalized second-price (GSP) pricing without self-pricing, these interactions couple allocation and payment through a single global ranking. We prove that exact autobidding equilibria under budget and return-on-investment (ROI) constraints can be computed in polynomial time whenever either the number $n$ of advertisers or the number $K$ of display slots is fixed. Our algorithms rely on two structural reductions. With few advertisers, the payment polytopes of tied bid layers combine by a Minkowski sum, giving a fixed-dimensional representation of exponentially many rankings. With few slots, budget equilibria admit threshold recovery and an exact submodular description of attainable payments at the display boundary. For ROI, we prove that every group-consecutive equilibrium has a representative with at most $K+2$ nonunit multipliers, preserving the item and price in every displayed slot. In each case, the reduction leads to polynomially many systems of polynomial equations and inequalities in bounded dimension. The algorithms compute exact multipliers and explicit distributions over valid group-consecutive rankings, with support at most $n+1$; for ROI with few slots, this improves to $\min\{n+1,K+3\}$.