Economics and Electronic Commerce

Google is a global leader in electronic commerce. Not surprisingly, it devotes considerable attention to research in this area. Topics include 1) auction design, 2) advertising effectiveness, 3) statistical methods, 4) forecasting and prediction, 5) survey research, 6) policy analysis and a host of other topics. This research involves interdisciplinary collaboration among computer scientists, economists, statisticians, and analytic marketing researchers at Google and academic institutions around the world.

A major challenge is in solving these problems at very large scales. For example, the advertising market has billions of transactions daily, spread across millions of advertisers. It presents a unique opportunity to test and refine economic principles as applied to a very large number of interacting, self-interested parties with a myriad of objectives.

It is remarkable how some of the fundamental problems Google grapples with are also some of the hardest research problems in the academic community. At Google, this research translates direction into practice, influencing how production systems are designed and used.

209 Publications