First-Price Auctions in Online Display Advertising

The authors link the rapid and dramatic move from second-price to first-price auction format in the display advertising market, on the one hand, to the move from the waterfalling mechanism employed by publishers for soliciting bids in a preordered cascade over exchanges to an alternate header bidding strategy that broadcasts the request for bid to all exchanges simultaneously, on the other. First, they argue that the move from waterfalling to...