Essays on Personalization and Market Design in Mobile Advertising

Abstract

Personalization and market design are two pillars of mobile advertising that resulted in a dramatic growth in this industry over the past few years. In this dissertation, I focus on these two topics and study the new challenges and opportunities that arise in mobile advertising industry. In particular, I study the consequences of improved user trackability and sequential ad delivery in mobile in-app advertising. Chapter 2 focuses on the former and examine the privacy implications of it in a competitive environment, whereas Chapter 3 studies the latter and quantifies the effects of variety of previous ads on users’ engagement with the next ad. In Chapters 4 and 5, I combine the findings from the first two chapters and develop an Adaptive Ad Sequencing framework that determines how a publisher can personalize a sequence of ads for a user to maximize engagement, as well as how it can monetize these sequences through auctions to optimize revenues.