Maximally representative allocations for guaranteed delivery advertising campaigns

There are around 400 advertising networks that match opportunities for “display” advertising, which include banner ads, video ads and indeed all ads other than text-based ads, on web pages and candidate advertisements. This is about a billion business annually. The present study derives a method of pricing such advertisements based on their relative scarcity while ensuring that all campaigns obtain a reasonably representative sample of the relevant opportunities. The mechanism is well-behaved under supply uncertainty. A method based on the mechanism described in this paper was implemented by Yahoo! Inc.