Inspired by the popularity of the advertising model at search engines, many online retailing platforms have added a new revenue stream of advertising (i.e., sponsored ads) to their traditional commission-based business model. While this new hybrid model is intuitively appealing, questions on its...

Online e-commerce platforms such as Amazon and Taobao connect thousands of sellers and consumers every day. In this work, we study how such platforms should rank products displayed to consumers, and utilize the top and most salient slots. We present a model that considers consumers' search costs...

Problem Definition: Content promotion policies are playing an increasingly important role in improving content consumption and user engagement for online content platforms. However, a frequently used promotion policy generally neglects employing the diffusion effect within a crowd of users. In...