# Dashboard Mechanisms for Online Marketplaces

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a theoretical framework for designing dashboard-based mechanisms in online marketplaces, enabling long-lived agents to optimize bids with minimal calls to the allocation algorithm.

## Contribution

It develops online winner-pays-bid and all-pay mechanisms that use dashboards to replicate truthful outcomes with strategic equivalence, reducing algorithm calls.

## Key findings

- Dashboard mechanisms ensure strategic bidding is equivalent to truthful bidding.
- Single-call design reduces computational overhead.
- Mechanisms achieve desired allocations with minimal interaction.

## Abstract

This paper gives a theoretical model for design and analysis of mechanisms for online marketplaces where a bidding dashboard enables the bid-optimization of long-lived agents. We assume that a good allocation algorithm exists when given the true values of the agents and we develop online winner-pays-bid and all-pay mechanisms that implement the same outcome of the algorithm with the aid of a bidding dashboard. The bidding dashboards that we develop work in conjunction with the mechanism to guarantee that bidding according to the dashboard is strategically equivalent (with vanishing utility difference) to bidding truthfully in the sequential truthful implementation of the allocation algorithm. Our dashboard mechanism makes only a single call to the allocation algorithm in each stage.