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Ranking and Tradeoffs in Sponsored Search Auctions

Published: 15 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

In a sponsored search auction, decisions about how to rank ads impose tradeoffs between objectives, such as revenue and welfare. In this article, we examine how these tradeoffs should be made. We begin by arguing that the most natural solution concept to evaluate these tradeoffs is the lowest symmetric Nash equilibrium (SNE). As part of this argument, we generalise the well-known connection between the lowest SNE and the VCG outcome. We then propose a new ranking algorithm, loosely based on the revenue-optimal auction, that uses a reserve price to order the ads (not just to filter them) and give conditions under which it raises more revenue than simply applying that reserve price. Finally, we conduct extensive simulations examining the tradeoffs enabled by different ranking algorithms and show that our proposed algorithm enables superior operating points by a variety of metrics.

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    cover image ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
    ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation  Volume 4, Issue 3
    Special Issue on EC'13
    June 2016
    162 pages
    ISSN:2167-8375
    EISSN:2167-8383
    DOI:10.1145/2905047
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 15 June 2016
    Accepted: 01 March 2016
    Revised: 01 December 2015
    Received: 01 November 2013
    Published in TEAC Volume 4, Issue 3

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    Author Tags

    1. Sponsored search
    2. generalized second price
    3. keyword auctions
    4. reserve price

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