Research Challenges in Internet Ad Markets: Vignettes on Complex Environments

Kshipra Bhawalkar, Guru Guruganesh, Sébastien Lahaie, Andrés Perlroth, Balasubramanian Sivan

Abstract: Internet ad markets have been a great source of motivation and challenging problems for the Economics and Computation community. The practical design of these ad markets has also greatly benefited from advances in the Economics and Computation community. Through a series of vignettes, we aim to highlight interesting challenges in modern internet ad markets, born out of a Google perspective. In this first article, we focus on a few particular auction design and optimization questions motivated by the Sponsored Search and Display Ads markets. We hope these articles spur further progress in the research community and in industry.