Auctioning Keywords in Online Search

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. An issue of increasing importance for advertising providers is the “share structure” problem—that is, of the total available resources for each keyword (in terms of exposure), how large a...