This study examines consumers’ trust of and purchase choice from vendors listed in organic and sponsored search results. We conducted an experimental study with 132 subjects and controlled for several factors related to consumers’ online experiences (website quality, duration of search, product familiarity, and online shopping frequency). Our study shows that trust is lower for sponsored links ...

In this paper, we report results of an investigation into the factors influencing the selection of sponsored links by e-commerce Web searchers. In this research, 56 participants each engaged in six e-commerce Web searching tasks. We mined these tasks from the transaction log of a major Web search engine, so the tasks represent real e-commerce searching information needs. Using 60 organic and 30...

Auctions are key mechanisms for allocating scarce resources among multiple parties. While traditionally auctions have mainly been applied to the selling of physical goods, they are becoming increasingly popular as mechanisms for such diverse tasks as procurement, bandwidth allocation, or selling online ad space. At the same time, privacy is a crucial issue in electronic commerce. A major reason...

This research has attempted to find the impact of information quality (IQ) and system quality (SQ) on users’ attitude to adopt the interactive TV based auction service. The primary two factors, IQ and SQ, frequently have been found in a number of IS studies as significant factors affecting users’ attitude toward innovative products or services. In this study, we adopted the two factors and trus...

This paper presents the findings from an exploratory in-depth case study with regard to eReverse Auctions (eRAs) in the UK public sector. These findings highlight that eRAs can improve procurement processes, realise cost savings and reduce delivery times. The research also notes that eRAs can produce dis-benefits, including poor buyer and supplier relationships and social implications. The pape...

Large commercial search engines such as Google Search, Microsoft’s Bing, and Yahoo! Search have recently emerged as information gateways for millions of Internet users. Their unique role as an intermediary between Internet users and the vast Web content has created exciting marketing opportunities for many commercial firms that wish to advertise their product or service. As a result, a new mult...

In 2010 sponsored search advertisements generated over $12 billion in revenue for search engines in the US market and accounted for 46% of online advertising revenue. A substantial portion of this revenue was generated by the sale of search keywords using an auction mechanism. We analyze a game-theoretic model to understand the interplay between organic and sponsored links in keyword auctions. ...

The advent of sponsored search advertising raises many interesting questions regarding consumer's behavior, seller's advertising strategy, and the ensuing market dynamics. Online markets are characterized by significant information asymmetries and consumers rely on a number of informational cues or signals to infer the seller's quality. Of the various quality signals, advertising and price have...

Most research in sponsored search auctions assume that users act in a stochastic manner, ignoring potential strategic deliberations. We propose a simple model of user costs and benefits. We then show how to formulate the corresponding sponsored search environment as a Markov decision process. For certain sponsored-search mechanisms, we are able to derive the optimal (i.e., utility-maximizing) u...