Intermediaries in the Online Advertising Market

Optimal Contracts for Intermediaries in Online Advertising

In online display advertising, the prevalent method advertisers employ to acquire impressions is to contract with an intermediary. These contracts involve upfront payments made by the advertisers to the intermediary, in exchange for running their campaigns on their behalf. This paper studies the optimal contract offered by the intermediary in a setting where advertisers’ budgets and targeting c...

Auction mechanisms for demand-side intermediaries in online advertising exchanges

Motivated by the online advertising exchange marketplace where demand-side intermediaries conduct local upstream auctions and participate in the exchanges’ real-time auctions, we study the revenue and efficiency effects of three different auction mechanisms for such intermediaries. Specifically, we consider the widely-used first-price sealed-bid auction and two variations of the Vickrey auction...

Intermediaries for the IP market

Online Advertising: Heterogeneity and Conflation in Market Design

The past decade has seen the explosive emergence of online advertising as a major source of revenue for Internet publishers. Analyses of this phenomenon are mostly conducted in the sway of Google’s hugely successful search advertising program. In the early days of the Internet, before Google, virtually all advertising revenues were related to simple display ads. Yet by 2008 search advertising a...

Direct-to-Consumer Advertising in the Presence of Expert Intermediaries

This paper empirically investigates how the intensity of direct-to-consumer advertising depends on the sales channel, using data from the US mutual fund industry. The empirical analysis exploits the presence of two sales channels within the industry, one where firms sell directly to end consumers and another where firms sell through expert intermediaries. I find that firms in the direct sales c...