Related papers: User Satisfaction in Competitive Sponsored Search
Major search engines deploy personalized Web results to enhance users' experience, by showing them data supposed to be relevant to their interests. Even if this process may bring benefits to users while browsing, it also raises concerns on…
Motivated by agentic markets -- two-sided markets in which consumers and businesses are assisted by AI tools that facilitate consumers' search -- we study the impact of improved search technology on learning and welfare in markets. We put…
Ranking models are typically designed to provide rankings that optimize some measure of immediate utility to the users. As a result, they have been unable to anticipate an increasing number of undesirable long-term consequences of their…
Strategic classification studies the design of a classifier robust to the manipulation of input by strategic individuals. However, the existing literature does not consider the effect of competition among individuals as induced by the…
Aligning AI systems with human values remains a fundamental challenge, but does our inability to create perfectly aligned models preclude obtaining the benefits of alignment? We study a strategic setting where a human user interacts with…
Click models are an important tool for leveraging user feedback, and are used by commercial search engines for surfacing relevant search results. However, existing click models are lacking in two aspects. First, they do not share…
Firms' algorithm development practices are often homogeneous. Whether firms train algorithms on similar data, aim at similar benchmarks, or rely on similar pre-trained models, the result is correlated predictions. We model the impact of…
Fairness in advertising is a topic of particular concern motivated by theoretical and empirical observations in both the computer science and economics literature. We examine the problem of fairness in advertising for general purpose…
Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…
Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by…
We investigate market forces that would lead to the emergence of new classes of players in the sponsored search market. We report a 3-fold diversification triggered by two inherent features of the sponsored search market, namely, capacity…
We feel happy when web-browsing operations provide us with necessary information; otherwise, we feel bitter. How to measure this happiness (or bitterness)? How does the profile of happiness grow and decay during the course of web-browsing?…
When online sellers use AI learning algorithms to automatically compete on e-commerce platforms, there is concern that they will learn to coordinate on higher than competitive prices. However, this concern was primarily raised in…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…
In search and advertisement ranking, it is often required to simultaneously maximize multiple objectives. For example, the objectives can correspond to multiple intents of a search query, or in the context of advertising, they can be…
We consider games in which players search for a hidden prize, and they have asymmetric information about the prize location. We study the social payoff in equilibria of these games. We present sufficient conditions for the existence of an…
In various markets where sellers compete in price, price oscillations are observed rather than convergence to equilibrium. Such fluctuations have been empirically observed in the retail market for gasoline, in airline pricing and in the…
We study how standard auction objectives in sponsored search markets change with refinements in the prediction of the relevance (click-through rates) of ads. We study mechanisms that optimize for a convex combination of efficiency and…
Rankings have become the primary interface in two-sided online markets. Many have noted that the rankings not only affect the satisfaction of the users (e.g., customers, listeners, employers, travelers), but that the position in the ranking…
In-degree, PageRank, number of visits and other measures of Web page popularity significantly influence the ranking of search results by modern search engines. The assumption is that popularity is closely correlated with quality, a more…