Andrei Broder - Yahoo! Research

Introduction to Computational Advertising

This tutorial will provide an introduction to computational advertising (CA), a new scientific discipline, at the intersection of information retrieval, machine learning, optimization, and microeconomics. Its central challenge is to find the best advertisement to present to a user engaged in a given context, such as querying a search engine ("sponsored search"), reading a web page ("content match" and "display ads"), watching a movie on a mobile, or instant messaging and texting. As such, CA provides the foundations for building ad matching platforms that constitute the infrastructure of the $20 billion online advertising industry.  This tutorial will focus on the algorithmic  and practical  aspects of CA rather than the micro-economics aspects (auctions, stability, etc) but it will be self-contained.

Kamal Jain and Nikhil Devanur - Microsoft Research

Computational Issues in Market Equilibria

The tutorial will give a self contained introduction to the computational aspects of market equilibrium. We start with a brief summary of the classical work in economics. The bulk of the tutorial will discuss the algorithmic results for market equilibrium obtained in the past decade, giving a sample of the various techniques employed. This will be followed by a few hardness results, some recent results on market dynamics and a vision for the role of equilibrium theory in the online world.

Tim Roughgarden - Stanford University

Bayesian and Worst-Case Revenue Maximization

(SLIDES of the tutorial : Part 1 - Part 2)

What selling procedure maximizes a seller's revenue?  We first present the beautiful classical results for Bayesian environments and recent simplifications thereof.  We then describe a new general analysis framework (developed with Jason Hartline) for worst-case revenue-maximization guarantees.

Tommaso Valletti - Imperial College (London) and University of Rome "Tor Vergata"

Two-sided markets and network interconnection in telecommunications networks

(SLIDES of the tutorial : Here)

Telecommunications networks can be studied as classic “two-sided” markets: there are senders and receivers who interact with each other and need telcos platforms to convey their calls. The tutorial will give a self contained introduction to pricing strategies on the various sides of this market. The bulk of the tutorial will discuss the role of inter-network (wholesale) payments and their impact of retail tariffs. Policy and regulatory conclusions will be derived and recent empirical evidence will be presented.