Building upon the static model of Athey and Ellison (2008), we demonstrate the efficient convergence of dynamic position auctions in the presence of consumer search. The entry of low-quality advertisers does not slow this convergence. Our methods are extensions of those introduced by Cary et al....

Keyword advertising, or "sponsored links" that appear alongside online search results or other online content, has grown into a multibillion-dollar market. Providers of keyword advertising, such as Google and Yahoo!, profit by auctioning keywords to advertisers. One issue of increasing...

We analyze a large-scale randomized field experiment in which a search engine varied the prominence of search ads for 3.3 million US users: one group of users saw the status quo, while the other saw a lower level of advertising (with prominence of search ads decreased). Revealed preference data...

Search engines enable advertisers to target consumers based on the query they have entered. In a framework in which consumers search sequentially after having entered a query, I show that targeting reduces search costs, improves matches and intensifies price competition. However, a...

We study consumer response towards sponsored search advertising and how to improve advertising performance on a large e-commerce platform. Our research design is based on a field experiment which randomizes the salience of ad disclosure to consumers, and a natural experiment which eradicates a...

Standard search models assume that consumers actively decide on the order, identity, and number of products they search. We document that online, a large fraction of searches happen in a more passive manner, with consumers merely reacting to online advertisements that do not allow them to choose...

Although it is widely acknowledged that ad rankings matter in sponsored search advertising (SSA) in both academia and industry, its potential effect on people’s attitudes toward advertising remains as an overlooked issue. This study proposes and tests a conceptual model examining the role of...

There has been significant recent interest in studying consumer behavior in sponsored search advertising (SSA). Researchers have typically used daily data from search engines containing measures such as average bid, average ad position, total impressions, clicks and cost for each keyword in the...

In this paper, we explore how keyword ambiguity can affect search advertising performance. Consumers arrive at search engines with diverse interests, which are often unobserved and nontrivial to predict. The search interests of different consumers may vary even when they are searching using the...