This paper shows a vulnerability of the pay-per-click accounting of Google Ads and proposes a statistical tradeoff-based approach to manage this vulnerability. The result of this paper is a model to calculate the overhead cost per click necessary to protect the subscribers and a simple algorithm...

Why do markets boom and crash? Why do fads and social norms start and end? The answer is found in a branch of social science literature called “cascade theory.” Cascade theory explains the observable human behavior of imitation: following the actions of someone else simply because one has...

We analyze a large-scale randomized field experiment in which a search engine varied the prominence of search ads for 3.3 million US users: one group of users saw the status quo, while the other saw a lower level of advertising (with prominence of search ads decreased). Revealed preference data...