Bidding Strategies with Gender Nondiscrimination: Constraints for Online Ad Auctions

TL;DR

This paper develops bidding strategies that prevent gender nondiscrimination in online ad auctions without changing the auction mechanism, analyzing their costs and optimality through mathematical proofs and simulations.

Contribution

It introduces novel bidding strategies to ensure gender nondiscrimination in online advertising, avoiding the need to alter auction mechanisms.

Findings

Strategies effectively prevent gender bias in ad exposure.

Optimality of strategies proven in certain settings.

Simulations demonstrate strategy performance across various scenarios.

Abstract

Interactions between bids to show ads online can lead to an advertiser's ad being shown to more men than women even when the advertiser does not target towards men. We design bidding strategies that advertisers can use to avoid such emergent discrimination without having to modify the auction mechanism. We mathematically analyze the strategies to determine the additional cost to the advertiser for avoiding discrimination, proving our strategies to be optimal in some settings. We use simulations to understand other settings.