Internet advertising and the generalized second-price auction: Selling billions of dollars worth of keywords

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Edelman, Benjamin; Ostrovsky, Michael; Schwarz, Michael
• 署名单位: Harvard University; Stanford University; Yahoo! Inc
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0002-8282
• DOI: 10.1257/aer.97.1.242
• 发表日期: 2007
• 页码: 242-259
• 关键词: allocation; rules

摘要

We investigate the generalized second-price (GSP) auction, a new mechanism used by search engines to sell online advertising. Although GSP looks similar to the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, its properties are very different. Unlike the VCG mechanism, GSP generally does not have an equilibrium in dominant strategies, and truth-telling is not an equilibrium of GSP. To analyze the properties of GSP, we describe the generalized English auction that corresponds to GSP and show that it has a unique equilibrium. This is an ex post equilibrium, with the same payoffs to all players as the dominant strategy equilibrium of VCG.