Characterizing Optimal Adword Auctions

We present a number of models for the adword auctions used for pricing advertising slots on search engines such as Google, Yahoo! etc. We begin with a general problem formulation which allows the privately known valuation per click to be a function of both the identity of the advertiser and the slot. We present a compact characterization of the set of all deterministic incentive compatible direct mechanisms for this model. This new characterization allows us to conclude that there are incentive compatible mechanisms for this auction with a multi-dimensional type-space that are {\em not} affine maximizers. Next, we discuss two interesting special cases: slot independent valuation and slot independent valuation up to a privately known slot and zero thereafter. For both of these special cases, we characterize revenue maximizing and efficiency maximizing mechanisms and show that these mechanisms can be computed with a worst case computational complexity $O(n^2m^2)$ and $O(n^2m^3)$ respectively, where $n$ is number of bidders and $m$ is number of slots. Next, we characterize optimal rank based allocation rules and propose a new mechanism that we call the customized rank based allocation. We report the results of a numerical study that compare the revenue and efficiency of the proposed mechanisms. The numerical results suggest that customized rank-based allocation rule is significantly superior to the rank-based allocation rules.Comment: 29 pages, work was presented at a) Second Workshop on Sponsored Search Auctions, Ann Arbor, MI b) INFORMS Annual Meeting, Pittsburgh c) Decision Sciences Seminar, Fuqua School of Business, Duke Universit

PROPOSAL FOR A STEP OF SELECTION SUPPORT OF BEST PRACTICES FOR THE PILOTING OF THE E-MARKETING PROJECTS

With 1.8 billion investments on the web in the first semester of 2008, being 14.7% of publicity investments , E-marketing is a discipline which is in the middle of media strategies. However, the evolutions of internet and of e-marketing tools have developed a discipline becoming increasingly complex to understand.Although there are still many different methods of piloting, essentially based on the measure via the discipline of the Web Analytics, it’s difficult today to predict e-marketing actions to set up to make fluctuate key performance indicators of web site and active e-marketing lever statistic auditing solution. However it is starting from these indicators that success is measured and that the profits of the online activities are maximized. Thus we propose through this article, a method of qualification of the Best Practices in order to assist the online marketers in the choice and the selection of those to improve the performance of a site and associated actions E-Marketing.e-Marketing, best practices, technological watch, innovative indicators, knowledge management, decision making.

Giving consumers a political voice : organized consumerism and the Belgian Welfare State, 1957-1981

Immediately after the Second World War, the word ‘consumer’ was an ill-defined signifier. By the early eighties, citizens’ interests were often routinely equated with consumer interests. We can attribute this in no small amount to the rise of consumer movements, who published comparative tests in monthly periodicals. These private organizations became the proverbial ‘consumer trade unions’: they drew attention to the producer consumer-cleavage and raised consumer awareness. In Belgium there were two separate consumer movements. Test-Achats (1957-present) promoted individual foresight as the best strategy for consumer protection. The working-class Union Féminine pour l’Information et la Défense du Consommateur (hereafter ufidec, 1959-1984) was an organization led by social-democratic women. ufidec demanded more legal solutions from consumers and believed in strong collective action. This article investigates how and why consumer organizations gained influence and legitimacy within the welfare state. The government initially rebuffed organized consumerism, only to accommodate it somewhat after the oil crisis in 1973. However, if institutions (or proposed institutions) for consumer politics in Belgium remained relatively weak or ineffective, it was because they represented a compromise between a civil society intent upon its own survival, and a government more than willing to let consumers fend for themselves. This article is part of the special issue on consumption history.</p

The appeal of the international Baccalaureate in Australia's educational market: a curriculum of choice of mobile futures

In Australia there is growing interest in a national curriculum to replace the variety of matriculation credentials managed by State Education departments, ostensibly to address increasing population mobility. Meanwhile, the International Baccalaureate (IB) is attracting increasing interest and enrolments in State and private schools in Australia, and has been considered as one possible model for a proposed Australian Certificate of Education. This paper will review the construction of this curriculum in Australian public discourse as an alternative frame for producing citizens, and ask why this design appeals now, to whom, and how the phenomenon of its growing appeal might inform national curricular debates. The IB’s emergence is understood with reference to the larger context of neo-liberal marketization policies, neo-conservative claims on the curriculum and middle class strategy. The paper draws on public domain documents from the IB Organisation and newspaper reportage to demonstrate how the IB is constructed for public consumption in Australia

AgentCF: Collaborative Learning with Autonomous Language Agents for Recommender Systems

Recently, there has been an emergence of employing LLM-powered agents as believable human proxies, based on their remarkable decision-making capability. However, existing studies mainly focus on simulating human dialogue. Human non-verbal behaviors, such as item clicking in recommender systems, although implicitly exhibiting user preferences and could enhance the modeling of users, have not been deeply explored. The main reasons lie in the gap between language modeling and behavior modeling, as well as the incomprehension of LLMs about user-item relations. To address this issue, we propose AgentCF for simulating user-item interactions in recommender systems through agent-based collaborative filtering. We creatively consider not only users but also items as agents, and develop a collaborative learning approach that optimizes both kinds of agents together. Specifically, at each time step, we first prompt the user and item agents to interact autonomously. Then, based on the disparities between the agents' decisions and real-world interaction records, user and item agents are prompted to reflect on and adjust the misleading simulations collaboratively, thereby modeling their two-sided relations. The optimized agents can also propagate their preferences to other agents in subsequent interactions, implicitly capturing the collaborative filtering idea. Overall, the optimized agents exhibit diverse interaction behaviors within our framework, including user-item, user-user, item-item, and collective interactions. The results show that these agents can demonstrate personalized behaviors akin to those of real-world individuals, sparking the development of next-generation user behavior simulation

Internet for the debate from the notions of rationality and liberty of Amartya Sen and Michel Foucault

Internet tiene una gran importancia para organizar nuestras vidas sociales y privadas. Desde este contexto se reflexiona sobre qué márgenes dejan Internet para ejercer nuestra racionalidad y libertad, mediante una participación activa y libre, derechos fundamentales de los ciudadanos, entendido como elementos imprescindibles del ideal democrático. Se parte de la base de lo que debería ser un tipo ideal de tecnología al servicio de los valores democráticos, utilizando Internet como un bien común para la ciudadanía. Desde esta perspectiva se reflexiona sobre el uso de la publicidad y del marketing político en la red. El texto contiene algunas interpretaciones de lo que sería un espacio común en Internet como ideal democrático. Para hacer este análisis, se utilizan las nociones de racionalidad y libertad de Amartya Sen y Michel Foucault, a partir de los cuales se trabaja para contrastar dos dimensiones de la democracia. Una más deliberativa, en línea con el ideal del bien común de Ostrom (2000), que correspondería a una democracia por discusión, siguiendo a Amartya Sen.. La otra dimensión correspondería a un modelo democrático con toques oligárquicos, en un contexto económico neoliberal, más en una línea de racionalidad vinculada a las relaciones de poder e intereses del mercado, siguiendo a Foucault. Para ambos es importante la libertad, basada en la participación y debates públicos en Sen, y actitud crítica del individuo, siguiendo a Foucault.Internet has a great importance to organize our social and private lives. From this context, the text reflects on what margins the Internet leaves to exercise our rationality and freedom, considering fundamental rights of citizens, and based on the best principles of the ideal of the democratic model. It is based on what should be an ideal type of technology at the service of democratic values, which would be to use the Internet as a common good for citizens. In this sense, this text contains some interpretations of what would be a common space on the Internet; It would aim to strengthen a democracy circumscribed by the most basic principles of this political model. To make this analysis, the notions of rationality and freedom of Amartya Sen and Michel Foucault are used, from which one works to contrast two functions of democracy, one is more deliberative, is in line with the idea of the common good of Ostrom (2000), a democracy by discussion following Amartya Sen. The other is a democratic model with oligarchic touches, in a neoliberal economic context, more in a line of rationality linked to power relations, following Foucault. Freedom is important for both of them, based on the participation and critical behavior of the individual

A Dynamic Model of Sponsored Search Advertising

Sponsored search advertising is ascendant Jupiter Research reports expenditures rose 28% in 2007 to $8.9B and will continue to rise at a 15landscape. Yet little, if any empirical research focuses upon search engine marketing strategy by integrating the behavior of various agents in sponsored search advertising (i.e., searchers, advertisers, and the search engine platform). The dynamic structural model we propose serves as a foundation to explore these and other sponsored search advertising phenomena. Fitting the model to a proprietary data set provided by an anonymous search engine, we conduct several policy simulations to illustrate the bene ts of our approach. First, we explore how information asymmetries between search engines and advertisers can be exploited to enhance platform revenues. This has consequences for the pricing of market intelligence. Second, we assess the effect of allowing advertisers to bid not only on key words, but also by consumers searching histories and demographics thereby creating a more targeted model of advertising. Third, we explore several different auction pricing mechanisms and assess the role of each on engine and advertiser profits and revenues. Finally, we consider the role of consumer search tools such as sorting on consumer and advertiser behavior and engine revenues. One key finding is that the estimated advertiser value for a click on its sponsored link averages about 24 cents. Given the typical$22 retail price of the software products advertised on the considered search engine, this implies a conversion rate (sales per click) of about 1.1%, well within common estimates of 1-2% (gamedaily.com). Hence our approach appears to yield valid estimates of advertiser click valuations. Another finding is that customers appear to be segmented by their clicking frequency, with frequent clickers placing a greater emphasis on the position of the sponsored advertising link. Estimation of the policy simulations is in progress

The value of location in keyword auctions

Sponsored links on search engines are an emerging advertising tool, whereby a number of slots are put on sale through keyword auctions. This is also known as contextual advertising. Slot assignment and pricing in keyword auctions are then essential for the search engine\u2019s management since provide the main stream of revenues, and are typically accomplished by the Generalized Second Price (GSP) mechanism. In GSP the price of slots is a monotone function of the slot location, being larger for the highest slots. Though a higher location is associated with larger revenues, the lower costs associated with the lowest slots may make them more attractive for the advertiser. The contribution of this research is to show, by analytical and simulation results based on the theory of order statistics, that advertisers may not get the optimal slot they aim at (the slot maximizing their expected profit) and that the GSP mechanism may be unfair to all the winning bidders but the one who submitted the lowest bid