Ad Exchange: Technical

I set up a site to collect technical + research material about ad exchanges. I will keep the site updated. For now, it has two new research papers:

• Selective call-out and real time bidding. T. Chakraborty, E. Even-Dar, S. Guha, Y. Mansour and S. Muthukrishnan. ArXivs 2010. When publishers access the exchange, the exchange will call out ad networks selectively in real time if they have a bound on how many auctions they can participate. The paper studies two different pricing models, has some technical connection to buffer management in networks, uses primal-dual techniques for online approximation, and shows some experimental results. It is fair to say that the authors are excited about the way they have modeled this problem that is increasingly a challenge in practice.
  
• Auctions with Intermediaries. J. Feldman, V. Mirrokni, S. Muthukrishnan and M. Pai. 2010. Myerson's theory says how to auction a good for optimal revenue. In the ad exchange, we have two levels of auctions with the exchange auctioning good to the networks and the networks in turn selling to their downstream advertisers. What is the optimal revenue auction for either party in this case? This paper presents optimal auctions for ad networks and for the exchange, there are some interesting twists to the theory.
  

More in the future.