Most current banner advertising is sold through negotiation thereby incurring large transaction costs and possibly suboptimal allocations. We propose a new automated system for selling banner advertising. In this system, each advertiser specifies a collection of host webpages which are relevant to his product, a desired total quantity of impressions on these pages, and a maximum per-impression price. The system selects a subset of advertisers as winners and maps each winner to a set of impressions on pages within his desired collection. The distinguishing feature of our system as opposed to current combinatorial allocation mechanisms is that, mimicking the current negotiation system, we guarantee that winners receive at least as many advertising opportunities as they requested or else receive ample compensation in the form of a monetary payment by the host. Such guarantees are essential in markets like banner advertising where a major goal of the advertising campaign is developing bra...
Uriel Feige, Nicole Immorlica, Vahab S. Mirrokni,