Multi-category fairness in sponsored search auctions

Abstract

Fairness in advertising is a topic of particular concern motivated by theoretical and empirical observations in both the computer science and economics literature. We examine the problem of fairness in advertising for general purpose platforms that service advertisers from many different categories. First, we propose inter-category and intra-category fairness desiderata that take inspiration from individual fairness and envy-freeness. Second, we investigate the “platform utility” (a proxy for the quality of allocation) achievable by mechanisms satisfying these desiderata. More specifically, we compare the utility of fair mechanisms against the unfair optimum, and show by construction that our fairness desiderata are compatible with utility. Our mechanisms also enjoy nice implementation properties including metric-obliviousness, which allows the platform to produce fair allocations without needing to know the specifics of the fairness requirements.