• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second-Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords
  • Contributor: Edelman, Benjamin; Ostrovsky, Michael; Schwarz, Michael
  • Published: American Economic Association, 2007
  • Published in: American Economic Review, 97 (2007) 1, Seite 242-259
  • Language: English
  • DOI: 10.1257/aer.97.1.242
  • ISSN: 0002-8282
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: We investigate the “generalized second-price” (GSP) auction, a new mechanism used by search engines to sell online advertising. Although GSP looks similar to the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism, its properties are very different. Unlike the VCG mechanism, GSP generally does not have an equilibrium in dominant strategies, and truth-telling is not an equilibrium of GSP. To analyze the properties of GSP, we describe the generalized English auction that corresponds to GSP and show that it has a unique equilibrium. This is an ex post equilibrium, with the same payoffs to all players as the dominant strategy equilibrium of VCG. (JEL D44, L81, M37)