The design of the best economic mechanism for Sponsored Search Auctions
(SSAs) is a central task in computational mechanism design/game theory. Two
open questions concern the adoption of user models more accurate than that one
currently used and the choice between Generalized Second Price auction (GSP)
and Vickrey-Clark-Groves mechanism (VCG). In this paper, we provide some
contributions to answer these questions. We study Price of Anarchy (PoA) and
Price of Stability (PoS) over social welfare and auctioneer's revenue of GSP
w.r.t. the VCG when the users follow the famous cascade model. Furthermore, we
provide exact, randomized, and approximate algorithms, showing that in
real-world settings (Yahoo! Webscope A3 dataset, 10 available slots) optimal
allocations can be found in less than 1s with up to 1000 ads, and can be
approximated in less than 20ms even with more than 1000 ads with an average
accuracy greater than 99%.Comment: AAAI16, to appea
