Companies spend billions of dollars online for paid links to branded search terms. Measuring the effectiveness of this marketing spending is hard. Blake, Nosko and Tadelis (2015) ran an experiment with eBay, showing that when the company suspended paid search, most of the traffic still ended up...

In this paper, I derive a new method to identify the distribution of the advertiser's ad-value in the sponsored search auction, explicitly looking at weighted Generalized Second Price auction (GSPw henceforth). Compared to previous literature, this method incorporates a weaker and more realistic...

This paper presents an empirical model of sponsored search auctions in which advertisers are ranked by bid and ad quality. We introduce a new nonparametric estimator for the advertiser's ad value and its distribution under the 'incomplete information' assumption. The ad value is characterized by...

We conduct an experiment where subjects read online news articles and are shown ads for brands next to those articles. Using eye-tracking technology, we measure the attention that each individual devotes to each article and ad. Then, respondents choose between cash or vouchers for the brands...

This paper studies a model of search engine competition with endogenous obfuscation. Platforms may differ in the quality of their search algorithms. I study the impact of this heterogeneity in consumer surplus, seller profits and platform revenue. I show that the dominant platform will typically...

Search engines are important access channels to news content of traditional newspapers with Google alone responsible for 35% of online visits to news outlets in the European Union. Yet, the effects of Google Search on market competition and information diversity have received scant attention....

A large literature studies subjective beliefs about economic facts using unincentivized survey questions. We devise randomized experiments in a representative online survey to investigate whether incentivizing belief accuracy affects stated beliefs about average earnings by professional degree...

Ranking algorithms are the information gatekeepers of the Internet era. We develop a stylized framework to study the effects of ranking algorithms on opinion dynamics. We consider rankings that depend on popularity and on personalization. We find that popularity driven rankings can enhance...