Sponsored search auctions: an overview of research with emphasis on game theoretic aspects

We provide a broad overview of the research that has been conducted until recently on the design of sponsored search auctions. We mainly focus on game theoretic and mechanism design aspects of these auctions, and we analyze the issues associated with each of the three participating entities, i.e., the search engine, the advertisers, and the users of the search engine, as well as their resulting behavior. Regarding the search engine, we overview the various mechanisms that have been proposed including the currently used GSP mechanism. The issues that are addressed include analysis of Nash equilibria and their performance, design of alternative mechanisms and aspects of competition among search engines. We then move on to the advertisers and discuss the problem of choosing a bidding strategy, given the mechanism of the search engine. Following this, we consider the end users and we examine how user behavior may create externalities and influence the performance of the advertisers. Finally, we also overview statistical methods for estimating modeling parameters that are of interest to the three entities. In each section, we point out interesting open problems and directions for future research.

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