Lecture 9

Today we started to discuss computational advertising (ad auctions).  I gave you a little overview, and then started with auction basics.  We discussed first price, second price, ascending bid, and descending bid auctions.  We started to look at a simple version of the "revenue equivalence theorem", but got a little hung up on the "revelation principle".  I'll start from there on Wednesday and try to clarify things.  Then we'll move on to understanding how ad auctions work in practice.