Advertisers seek to maximize profits by investing in advertising. We propose a “cost-per-incremental-action” (CPIA) pricing model which incorporates the causal contribution of advertising in order to achieve the advertisers' objectives such as profit maximization. CPIA pricing aligns...

This paper provides a comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of online advertising markets, mostly based on techniques from the emergent discipline of complex systems analysis. First, we look at how the display rank of a URL link influences its click frequency, for both sponsored...

This paper studies how restricting data exchange between firms affects market competition in the app economy. The identification exploits iOS's privacy policy update, which limits apps from tracking users across other apps using identifiers. We find that the iOS update reduces startup app...

Traditional advertising, such as TV and print advertising, primarily builds awareness of a firm's product among consumers. On the other hand, sponsored search advertising can target consumers in a later stage of the purchase process because they self-identify themselves by searching for a...

We measure the effectiveness of competitive advertising on brand search using alarge-scale, quasi-experimental ad allocation on Bing. Competitors are able to stealtraffic from the focal brand, and they steal an order of magnitude more clicks if the focalbrand's link is exogenously removed from...

We study an online display advertising planning problem in which advertisers’ demands for ad exposures (impressions) of various types compete for slices of shared resources, and advertisers prefer to receive impressions that are evenly-spread across the audience segments they target. We use...

Click fraud is the practice of deceptively clicking on search ads with the intention of either increasing third-party website revenues or exhausting an advertiser's budget. Search advertisers are forced to trust that search engines do everything possible to detect and prevent click fraud even...

Firms compete for slots on an ad-financed platform by paying the platform to display their ads. In its design, the platform decides on its ``matching quality'' by choosing how much weight to give to each firm’s payment while taking into account consumers’ preferences. Increasing the quality...

This paper examines the effects of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs on doctor choice of drug brands. Using antihistamines as an example, we show that DTCA has little effect on the choice of brand despite the massive DTCA expenditure incurred in this class. In contrast,...

Sponsored search is the mechanism whereby where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (non-sponsored) web search results. Based on prior literature, we draw an analogy between these markets and financial markets. We use the analogy as well as the key...