An important decision for a firm is how to allocate its advertising budget among different types of advertising. Traditional advertising, such as advertising on television and in print, serves the purpose of building consumer awareness and desire about the firm’s products. With recent developments in technology, sponsored search (or paid search) advertising at search engines in response to a ke...

Recently there is an increase in smaller, domain–specific search engines that scour the deep web finding information that general–purpose engines are unable to discover. These search engines play a crucial role in the new generation of search paradigms where federated search engines (FSEs) integrate search results from heterogeneous sources. In this paper we pose, for the first time, the proble...