Wharton-SMU Research Center

In-House Seminar

Guest Speaker:

Kartik Hosanagar
Assistant Professor of Operations & Information Management
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

Date & Venue:
Date: 11 May 2006, Thursday
Time: 4.30pm-6.00pm
Venue: School of Information Systems, Level 2,
Networked Seminar Room 2.1
Singapore Management University
80 Stamford Road, Singapore 178902
(Location Map) Please note our new campus address.

Topic:
Optimal Bidding in Search Engine Advertising Auctions

Abstract:
Search engine advertising is an effective advertising channel because of the ability to target ads based on a consumers’ specific information needs and the ability to directly measure consumer response to specific ad campaigns. In this paper, we study optimal bidding strategies for advertisers in search engine advertising auctions. In general, these auctions are run as variants of second-price auctions but have been shown to be incentive incompatible. Thus, advertisers have to be strategic about bidding. Further, advertisers typically have budget constraints which restrict the amount they can spend on search advertising. We consider an advertiser with a budget constraint that can bid on hundreds or thousands of keywords and multiple search engines. We characterize the optimal bidding strategy associated with two objective functions – maximizing clicks and maximizing profit. We also test the bidding strategies against real-world data and find that the proposed strategies are effective in practice.

Registration:
This is a free seminar. Admission is on first-come-first-served. Please register early to avoid disappointment.
To register, please click here

Enquiries:
Ms. Rozana Bte Osman
Email: rozanaosman@smu.edu.sg, Tel: 6828-0802