AdWords and Generalized On-line Matching

How does a search engine company decide what ads to display with each query so as to maximize its revenue? This turns out to be a generalization of the online bipartite matching problem. We introduce the notion of a tradeoff revealing LP and use it to derive an optimal algorithm achieving a competitive ratio of 1 − 1/e for this problem.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: FOCS
• Authors: Aranyak Mehta, Amin Saberi, Umesh V. Vazirani, Vijay V. Vazirani
• Keywords: Bipartite Matching Problem, FOCS 2005, Search Engine Company, Theoretical Computer Science, Tradeoff Revealing Lp