Value of Targeting
Venue
Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT) (2014), pp. 194-205
Publication Year
2014
Authors
Kshipra Bhawalkar, Patrick Hummel, Sergei Vassilvitskii
BibTeX
Abstract
We undertake a formal study of the value of targeting data to an advertiser. As
expected, this value is increasing in the utility difference between realizations
of the targeting data and the accuracy of the data, and depends on the distribution
of competing bids. However, this value may vary non-monotonically with an
advertiser’s budget. Similarly, modeling the values as either private or
correlated, or allowing other advertisers to also make use of the data, leads to
unpredictable changes in the value of data. We address questions related to
multiple data sources, show that utility of additional data may be non-monotonic,
and provide tradeoffs between the quality and the price of data sources. In a
game-theoretic setting, we show that advertisers may be worse off than if the data
had not been available at all. We also ask whether a publisher can infer the value
an advertiser would place on targeting data from the advertiser’s bidding behavior
and illustrate that this is impossible.
