Web advertising is one of the major sources of income for numerous search engines, news sites and non-commercial publishers. Textual ads, characterized by Sponsored Search (SS) and Content Match (CM), make up a significant portion of Web advertising. In SS, with limited information about ad contents, given a query, the challenge is to place relevant ads alongside organic search results. Organic...

Some digital business models may be so innovative that they overwhelm existing regulatory mechanisms, both legislation and historical jurisprudence, and require extension to or modification of antitrust law. Regulatory policies that were developed in response to 19th or 20th century antitrust concerns dealt principally with economies of scale leading to monopoly power, and may not be well suite...

We estimate a structural model of sponsored search auctions at “Website X”, one of the largest online marketplaces in China. We use the estimates to address the distributional and revenue impact of “scoring” the auction, which is a way for shopping websites to reward larger merchants (by penalizing smaller merchants). We find evidence of horizontal differentiation in preferences, as merchants o...

In this research, we analyze the relationship among (1) the performance metrics of key phrases used in a sponsored search campaign, (2) the gender orientation of those key phrases, and (3) the occurrence of branded terms in those search queries. The aim of this research is increased personalization of search engine results in order to improve the consumer’s online searching experience and poten...

In this work we use techniques from the study of samplecomplexity in machine learning to reduce revenue maximizing auction problems to standard algorithmic questions. These results are particularly relevant to designing good pricing mechanisms for sponsored search. In particular we apply our results to two problems: profit maximizing combinatorial auctions, and auctions for pricing semantically...

Online sponsored search has emerged as a dominant business model for majority of search engines and as a popular advertising mechanism for online retailers. However, sponsored search advertising is being negatively impacted by click fraud which involves the intentional clicking on sponsored links with the purpose of gaining undue monetary returns for the search engine or harming a particular ad...

Sponsored search advertising has grown rapidly since the last decade and is now a significant revenue source for search engines. To ameliorate revenues, search engines often set fixed or variable reserve price to in influence advertisers’ bidding. This paper studies and compares two pricing mechanisms: the generalized second-price auction (GSP) where the winner at the last ad position pays the ...

The entrepreneurial case study showcases ‘morethailand.com’ an e-intermediary in the tourism industry. Based out of Thailand, the firm is in the process of finding a niche for itself through innovative online and offline marketing strategies with the constraint of limited resources. The case study attempts to focus on the e-business challenges in the travel and tourism sector especially in a de...

this study aimed to evaluate persian search engines based on the criteria obtained from alexa databank using correspondence analysis. through searching the web, 23 search engines were found, which due to their cease and no coverage by alexa, this number was reduced to 16. data analysis revealed that ghatreh search engine occupied a high rank in most of attributes like traffic rank, time spent o...