Title of Document: THE IMPACT OF ONLINE SPONSORED SEARCH ADVERTISING ON CONSUMER AND SELLER STRATEGIES

Sponsored search auction is used by most search engines to find ads shown the web page of search results. The income of this targeted advertising business is a big part of the revenue of most search engines. The most widely used approach to find ads is called Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction. Most previous works about GSP auction are based on the separation assumption: the probability a u...

In recent years auctions have become more and more important in the field of multiagent systems as useful mechanisms for resource allocation, task assignment and last but not least electronic commerce. In many cases the Vickrey (second-price sealed-bid) auction is used as a protocol that prescribes how the individual agents have to interact in order to come to an agreement. The main reasons for...

Abstract In the sponsored search auction, VCG and GSP have been compared by researchers from computer science and economics in the last few years. However, there have been some experiments not well consistent with the existing literatures. We proposed that an assumption could be refined, namely the dominant-strategy equilibrium is still the unique valid VCG equilibrium concept in the sponsored ...

On most sponsored search platforms, advertisers bid on some keywords for their advertisements (ads). Given a search request, ad retrieval module rewrites the query into bidding keywords, and uses these keywords as keys to select Top N ads through inverted indexes. In this way, an ad will not be retrieved even if queries are related when the advertiser does not bid on corresponding keywords. Mor...

Search queries follow a long tail distribution which results in harder management of ad space for sponsored search. During keyword auctions, advertisers also tend to target head query keywords, thereby creating an imbalance in demand for head and tail keywords. This leads to under-utilization of ad space of tail query keywords. In this paper, we have explored a mechanism that allows the adverti...

Sponsored search [4] is one of the most important forms of Internet advertising available to businesses today. In sponsored search, an advertiser pays to have its advertisement displayed alongside search engine results whenever a user searches for a specific keyword or set of keywords. An advertiser can thereby target only those users who might be interested in the advertiser’s products. Each o...

The Internet is rapidly growing as a marketing medium. This year online advertising expenditures will reach approximately $20 billion in the US alone. Two formats dominate online advertising: (i) Web sites buying advertising links from each other and (ii) search engines selling sponsored links on their results pages. The first part of the dissertation studies the former advertising model and in...

We estimate a structural model of a sponsored search auction model. To accommodate the “position paradox”, we relax the assumption of decreasing click volumes with position ranks, which is often assumed in the literature. Using data from “Website X”, one of the largest online marketplaces in China, we find that merchants of different qualities adopt different bidding strategies: high quality me...

Motivated by sponsored search auctions, we study multi-unit auctions with budget constraints. In the mechanism we propose, Sort-Cut, understating budgets or values is weakly dominated. Since Sort-Cut’s revenue is increasing in budgets and values, all kinds of equilibrium deviations from true valuations turn out to be bene…cial to the auctioneer. We show that the revenue of Sort-Cut can be an or...