Marketing agencies and collusive bidding in online ad auctions

The transition of the advertising market from traditional media to the internet has induced a proliferation of marketing agencies specialized in bidding in the auctions that are used to sell ad space on the web. We analyze how collusive bidding can emerge from bid delegation to a common marketing ag...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Decarolis, Francesco, Goldmanis, Maris, Penta, Antonio
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión aceptada para publicación
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Institución:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/45339
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/45339
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2019.3457
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Collusion
Digital marketing agencies
Facebook
Google
Internet auctions
Online advertising
GSP
VCG
Descripción
Sumario:The transition of the advertising market from traditional media to the internet has induced a proliferation of marketing agencies specialized in bidding in the auctions that are used to sell ad space on the web. We analyze how collusive bidding can emerge from bid delegation to a common marketing agency and how this can undermine the revenues and allocative efficiency of both the generalized second-price auction (GSP, used by Google, Microsoft Bing, and Yahoo!) and the Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) mechanism (used by Facebook). We find that despite its well-known susceptibility to collusion, the VCG mechanism outperforms the GSP auction in terms of both revenues and efficiency.