Autobidding with Constraints

Autobidding is becoming increasingly important in the domain of online advertising, and has become a critical tool used by many advertisers for optimizing their ad campaigns. We formulate fundamental questions around the problem of bidding for performance under very general affine cost constraints. We design optimal single-agent bidding strategies for the general bidding problem, in multi-slot truthful auctions. The novel contribution is to show a strong connection between bidding and auction design, in that the bidding formula is optimal if and only if the underlying auction is truthful.