A well-known myopic bidding strategy fails to support an equilibrium of simultaneous ascending proxy auctions for heterogeneous items when a hard-close rule is in place. This is because, in common with the single-auction case, last minute bidding (sniping) is a best response to naive behaviour....

In many industries, consumers rely on recommendations by an intermediary when choosing between competing products. In this paper, we look at how the existence of contracts between firms and intermediaries affects the quality of the advice received by consumers, and firms' incentives to invest in...

type="main" <p>We study the effects of integration between a search engine and a publisher. In a model in which the search engine (i) allocates users across publishers and (ii) competes with publishers to attract advertisers, we find that the search engine is biased against publishers that display...</p>

Competition authorities all over the world worry that integration between search engines (mainly Google) and publishers could lead to abuses of dominant position.  In particular, one concern is that of own-content bias, meaning that Google would bias its rankings in favor of the publishers it...

Sending general advertisements with inflationary claims may attract additional visitors with whom an advertiser is poorly matched. This is costly when ads are priced per-click because many visitors (clickers) will not purchase. This renders per-click advertising particularly conducive to the...