March 5th, 2016, 4:54 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: AlanQuoteOriginally posted by: CuchulainnIndeed, I would avoid too much discussion on generic quant maths. Would a quant be a better fit than say someone with strong CS skills who is good with maths?I heard of cases when quant newbies had a week to study the book by Hull and in the second interview they would be grilled on it. Maybe something similar for auction theory?Exactly. I think the challenge for the advertising company is to find a good, technically-oriented PhD, and then convince them that thebusiness contains enough substantial problems to be worth their time. Given that, you can teach them enough about the auction business to get started,and a PhD should be able to take it from there. Certainly 'quant-refugees' will provide a pool of candidates (and presumably the reason the OP is posting here),but also fresh graduates, say with Econometrics, Statistics, Applied Math, or CS degrees.So some of the tasks they'll be involved in will be pricing and arbitrage. The 'challenge' with 2nd price auctions is that you don't know the value of something until you're the one who wins the auction. We would have to come up with a model that lets our business deliver client requirements at a low cost as possible.Again for arbitrage it's a similar problem... try to sell to a 3rd party at a high enough price to pay for the IT cost and to increase the probability of us being the final winners of the auction, but to set a price low enough that the 3rd will actually enter the auction.We currently participate in about 15 billion auctions a day and we typically have a maximum to 200ms to analyse an auction and if we decide to participate, calculate a price.I believe we're trying to get fresh grads, it's not up to me.