Economics and Electronic Commerce

Google is a global leader in electronic commerce. Not surprisingly, considerable attention is devoted 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 both at Google and academic institutions around the world.

A major challenge is solving these problems at very large scales. For example, the advertising market has billions of transactions daily, spread across millions of advertisers, presenting 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. At Google, research is an opportunity to translate direction into practice, influencing how production systems are designed and used.

Recent Publications

Data Exchange Markets via Utility Balancing
Kamesh Munagala
Sungjin Im
Aditya Bhaskara
Govind S. Sankar
WebConf (2024)
Modeling Recommender Ecosystems: Research Challenges at the Intersection of Mechanism Design, Reinforcement Learning and Generative Models
Martin Mladenov
Proceedings of the 38th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-24), Vancouver (2024) (to appear)
Learning Thresholds with Latent Value and Censored Feedback
Weiqiang Zheng
Jiahao Zhang
Xiaotie Deng
Tao Lin
ICLR (2024)
Individual Welfare Guarantees in the Autobidding World with Machine-learned Advice
Negin Golrezaei
Jason Cheuk Nam Liang
Patrick Jaillet
Proceedings of the ACM on Web Conference 2024, 267–275