When browsing the web using HTTPS, if a user Alice ignores, or clicks through, the browser’s SSL warnings of an invalid SSL certificate, she exposes her browser sessions to a Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, allowing attackers to intercept communication in the SSL channel. Recent work has measured the click-through rates for SSL warnings, indicating that more than 50% users click through SSL wa...

In pay-per-click online advertising systems like Google, Overture, or MSN, advertisers are charged for their ads only when a user clicks on the ad. While these systems have many advantages over other methods of selling online ads, they suffer from one major drawback. They are highly susceptible to a particular style of fraudulent attack called click fraud. Click fraud happens when an advertiser...

This paper addresses the determination and evaluation of optimal Internet marketing strategies when a firm is advertising on multiple websites. An optimization model is constructed for the determination of the optimal amount of click-throughs subject to a budget constraint. The underlying network structure of the problem is then revealed and exploited to obtain both qualitative properties of th...

Perception of the temporal structure of acoustic signals contributes critically to vocal signaling. In the aquatic clawed frog Xenopus laevis, calls differ primarily in the temporal parameter of click rate, which conveys sexual identity and reproductive state. We show here that an ensemble of auditory neurons in the laminar nucleus of the torus semicircularis (TS) of X. laevis specializes in en...

Computational advertising has received a tremendous amount of attention from the business and academic community recently. Great advances have been made in modeling click-through rates in well studied settings, such as, sponsored search and context match. However, local search has received relatively little attention. Geographic nature of local search and associated local browsing leads to inte...

Since the introduction of the first graphical web browser on the onslaught of web advertisement, academic and corporate researchers have been interested in studying factors that impact the effectiveness of advertising methods and banner ads in particular. The click-through rate of an ad has been the standard measuring stick for assessing the effectiveness of the ad. This study examines the effe...

In the standard model of sponsored search auctions, an ad is ranked according to the product of its bid and its estimated click-through rate (known as the quality score), where the estimates are taken as exact. This paper re-examines the form of the efficient ranking rule when uncertainty in click-through rates is taken into account. We provide a sufficient condition under which applying an exp...

In this paper, we develop and evaluate several probabilistic models of user click-through behavior that are appropriate for modeling the click-through rates of items that are presented to the user in a list. Potential applications include modeling the click-through rates of search results from a search engine, items ranked by a recommendation system, and search advertisements returned by a sear...