Marketing Agencies and Collusive Bidding in Online Ad Auctions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Decarolis, Francesco; Goldmanis, Maris; Penta, Antonio
• 署名单位: Bocconi University; Bocconi University; University of London; Royal Holloway University London; ICREA; Pompeu Fabra University; Universite de Toulouse; Universite Toulouse 1 Capitole; Toulouse School of Economics
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2019.3457
• 发表日期: 2020
• 页码: 4433-4454
• 关键词: Collusion; digital marketing agencies; facebook; Google; GSP; internet auctions; Online advertising; VCG

摘要

The transition of the advertising market from traditional media to the internet has induced a proliferation of marketing agencies specialized in bidding in the auctions that are used to sell ad space on the web. We analyze how collusive bidding can emerge from bid delegation to a common marketing agency and how this can undermine the revenues and allocative efficiency of both the generalized second-price auction (GSP, used by Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo!) and the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism (used by Facebook). We find that despite its well-known susceptibility to collusion, the VCG mechanism outperforms the GSP auction in terms of both revenues and efficiency.