Patent ID: 8073766

Claim:
A method including computer executable instructions executed by a processing unit for setting a market price and a market clearing price, the method comprising: determining, by the processing unit, a number of items to be sold at the market price; presenting, by the processing unit, an advertising opportunity of an advertisement for each of the number of items to be sold; creating a pseudo commodity, by the processing unit, that is assigned to bids to be received which fall below the market price, the pseudo commodity includes a number of pseudo items; receiving a plurality of bids for the items; setting the market price, by the processing unit, based on identifying a market clearing price, the number of items to be sold, and the number of pseudo items as a supply side, and the plurality of bids as a demand side; determining, by the processing unit, a first likelihood of selecting the advertising opportunity; determining, by the processing unit, a second likelihood of selecting the advertisement based on at least an estimated and a measured likelihood associated with the second likelihood of selecting the advertisement and setting the second likelihood to one for each pseudo bid; setting, by the processing unit, the market price for an auction, the auction includes a number of rounds where the number of items to be sold and the number of pseudo items are available for sale during each of the rounds, and each of the plurality of bids includes a bid price and an auction budget, the plurality of bids includes: a plurality of actual bids received from a number of actual bidders; and a plurality of pseudo bids received from a number of pseudo bidders, where: the number of pseudo bidders is equal to the number of items to be sold plus one; and each of the pseudo bids includes a pseudo auction budget; determining, by the processing unit, the market clearing price by maximizing a utility of each of the actual bidders and the pseudo bidders, where the utility is the product of the bid price, the first likelihood, and the second likelihood; selecting only a single advertisement for a single bidder to be presented on a single screen using at least one of: a matching polytope, which occurs when all of the items are sold and all of the budgets are exhausted; an assignment polytope, which assigns a first advertising opportunity to a first bidder for fifty percent of the first bidder's impressions and to a second bidder for fifty percent of the second bidder's impressions; or a double stochastic matrix, which includes a binary search algorithm employed to ensure that there are pseudo items to be assigned to below market price bids to effect a market clearing situation.