Marketing Agencies and Collusive Bidding in Online Ad Auctions

We are grateful for the comments received from Susan Athey, Jean-Pierre Benoit, Yeon-Koo Che, Kerry Gabrielson, Ken Hendricks, Jon Levin, Massimo Motta, Marco Ottaviani, Rob Porter, Marc Rysman, Andy Skrzypacz and Steve Tadelis and from the participants at the seminars at Berkeley-Haas Business School, Boston University, Columbia University, CREST-Paris, European Commission DG Competition, Facebook Research Lab, Harvard-MIT joint IO seminar, London Business School, Microsoft Research Lab, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of British Columbia, University of California Davis, University of Chicago, University of Bologna, University of Toronto, University of Wisconsin Madison. Antonio Penta acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2015-0563), and from the ERC Starting Grant #759424. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• October 24, 2017