Alan Rimm-Kaufman will be speaking at MIT’s Operations Research Center on “The Business And Mathematics of Pay-Per-Click Bidding” on May 30, 2008 as part of the “OR And The Internet” conference.

Abstract:

Have you noticed those little text ads on the right hand side of a Google search result page?

Those modest links provide the lion’s share of Google’s $16B in annual revenue, and their economic clout is overturning the traditional worlds of advertising and media.

This talk will review the basics of paid search from the marketing and economic angles.

I’ll present the stochastic optimization problem which lies at the heart of paid search marketing.

I’ll discuss why the paid search bidding problem is hard.

I’ll give some flavor of the proprietary heuristics my firm uses to reach decent solutions to this problem millions of times each day.

I’ll describe our current research collaborations, one with Prof. Eddie Pinker (Rochester) and one with Profs Kirthi Kalyanam, Sharad Borle, and Peter Boatwright (Santa Clara, Rice, Carnegie Mellon, respectively).

I’ll describe the data sets we share with our academic partners, and wrap with an invitation for additional collaboration.

Q&A

Conference link: MIT’s OR And The Internet conference