Related papers: The Limits of Search Algorithms
Modern commercial Internet search engines display advertisements along side the search results in response to user queries. Such sponsored search relies on market mechanisms to elicit prices for these advertisements, making use of an…
Two general algorithms based on opportunity costs are given for approximating a revenue-maximizing set of bids an auctioneer should accept, in a combinatorial auction in which each bidder offers a price for some subset of the available…
Recent scholarly work has extensively examined the phenomenon of algorithmic collusion driven by AI-enabled pricing algorithms. However, online platforms commonly deploy recommender systems that influence how consumers discover and purchase…
We study the problem of finding the optimal bidding strategy for an advertiser in a multi-platform auction setting. The competition on a platform is captured by a value and a cost function, mapping bidding strategies to value and cost…
We consider a seller who offers services to a buyer with multi-unit demand. Prior to the realization of demand, the buyer receives a noisy signal of their future demand, and the seller can design contracts based on the reported value of…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
We analyze the problem of how to optimally bid for ad spaces in online ad auctions. For this we consider the general case of multiple ad campaigns with overlapping targeting criteria. In our analysis we first characterize the structure of…
Based on the success of recommender systems in e-commerce, there is growing interest in their use in matching markets (e.g., labor). While this holds potential for improving market fluidity and fairness, we show in this paper that naively…
Ad auctions in sponsored search support ``broad match'' that allows an advertiser to target a large number of queries while bidding only on a limited number. While giving more expressiveness to advertisers, this feature makes it challenging…
We modify the standard model of price competition with horizontally differentiated products, imperfect information, and search frictions by allowing consumers to flexibly acquire information about a product's match value during their…
We consider the "Offline Ad Slot Scheduling" problem, where advertisers must be scheduled to "sponsored search" slots during a given period of time. Advertisers specify a budget constraint, as well as a maximum cost per click, and may not…
Internet advertisers (buyers) repeatedly procure ad impressions from ad platforms (sellers) with the aim to maximize total conversion (i.e. ad value) while respecting both budget and return-on-investment (ROI) constraints for efficient…
Search and matching increasingly takes place on online platforms. These platforms have elements of centralized and decentralized matching; platforms can alter the search process for its users, but are unable to eliminate search frictions…
We study a natural combinatorial pricing problem for sequentially arriving buyers with equal budgets. Each buyer is interested in exactly one pair of items and purchases this pair if and only if, upon arrival, both items are still available…
Investigating potential purchases is often a substantial investment under uncertainty. Standard market designs, such as simultaneous or English auctions, compound this with uncertainty about the price a bidder will have to pay in order to…
In a multiple-object auction, every bidder tries to win as many objects as possible with a bidding algorithm. This paper studies position-randomized auctions, which form a special class of multiple-object auctions where a bidding algorithm…
In this paper, we initiate the study of the multiplicative bidding language adopted by major Internet search companies. In multiplicative bidding, the effective bid on a particular search auction is the product of a base bid and bid…
Recent advances in machine learning have spurred significant interest in learning-augmented algorithms, particularly for online optimization. A growing body of work has studied online bidding in this framework, aiming to characterize the…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
Sponsored search is an indispensable business model and a major revenue contributor of almost all the search engines. From the advertisers' side, participating in ranking the search results by paying for the sponsored search advertisement…