Sponsored search is a multi-billion dollar industry and makes up a major source of revenue for search engines (SE). click-through-rate (CTR) estimation plays a crucial role for ads selection, and greatly affects the SE revenue, advertiser traffic and user experience. We propose a novel architecture for solving CTR prediction problem by combining artificial neural networks (ANN) with decision tr...

We study principled methods for incorporating user utility into the selection of sponsored search ads. We describe variations of the GSP allocation/pricing mechanism that accommodate these user utility functions, we provide interesting and useful parallels of some of the theoretical properties from the traditional GSP mechanisms in the new GSP variations, and we present simulation results that ...

In analyses of sponsored search auctions for online advertising, it is customary to model the dynamic game of incomplete information by considering a static games of complete information. This approach is used in Edelman, Ostrovsky and Schwarz (2007) (EOS), Varian (2007), and the subsequent literature. Modeling complex interactions in uncertain environments as games of complete information has ...

One of the most important yet insufficiently studied issues in online advertising is the externality effect among ads: the value of an ad impression on a page is affected not just by the location that the ad is placed in, but also by the set of other ads displayed on the page. For instance, a high quality competing ad can detract users from another ad, while a low quality ad could cause the vie...

Understanding the intention underlying users’ queries may help personalize search results and therefore improve user satisfaction. If a commercial intent exists, and if an ad is related to the user’s information need, the user may click on that ad. In this paper, we develop a methodology for using ad clickthrough logs from a commercial search engine to study characteristics of commercial intent...

The recent increase of domain–specific search engines, able to discover information unknown by general–purpose search engines, leads to their federation into a single entity, called federated search engine. In this paper, we focus on how it can effectively merge sponsored search results, provided by the domain–specific search engines, into a unique list. In particular, we discuss the case in wh...

Sponsored search auctions (SSAs) have attracted much research attention in recent years and different equilibrium concepts have been studied to understand advertisers’ behaviors. However, the assumption that bidders are perfectly rational in these studies is unrealistic in the real world. In this work, we investigate the quantal response equilibrium (QRE) for SSAs. QRE is powerful in characteri...

Sponsored Search Auctions (SSAs) arguably represent the problem at the intersection of computer science and economics with the deepest applications in real life. Within the realm of SSAs, the study of the effects that showing one ad has on the other ads, a.k.a. externalities in economics, is of utmost importance and has so far attracted the attention of much research. However, even the basic qu...

A fundamental problem in sponsored search advertising is the estimation of probability of click for ads displayed in response to search queries. The historical click-through rate (CTR) is one of the most important predictors of the click, and extracted at multiple resolutions of the query-ad hierarchy. However, the new ads do not have any click history, and even the existing ads might miss hist...