Aleksei Smirnov

The article reviews the basic approaches and theoretical models that describe the features and peculiarities of the modern and rapidly developing market of sponsored-search auctions on the Internet. We pay main attention to the sponsored-search auction design models and its comparative analysis. We also describe and compare different theoretical frameworks for this agenda, including static and dynamic games of perfect and imperfect information, structural models and models of users’ behavior. This branch of literature is relatively new, but it already attracts a signifi cant attention of world-leading scholars due to its high practical importance and new challenges to mechanism design theory.