On February 25, 2014, ISET hosted Dr. Sergei Izmalkov of the Moscow New Economic School. Dr. Izmalkov, who works with the most popular Russian search engine, Yandex, presented a paper he coauthored with Dmitry Arkhanglesky, Dilyara Khakimova and Sergey Lyashenko, titled: “On evaluation of click through rates and conversion rates of different positions in sponsored search auctions”.
At the beginning of his presentation Dr. Izmalkov introduced the problem of advertisement allocation. Using the examples of the most popular search engines, he explained how advertisements are generally distributed and how the payment for those is defined. Payment is proportional to the number of clicks a link gets, through the search results that the advertisement will appear on is decided by auction.
How significant is welfare loss in the presence of cartels? How best to fight against cartels to avoid them ex-ante? These were the leading questions of the presentation of Dr. Andrea Mantovani (University of Bologna) at ISET on February 20, 2014.
The presentation was based on the article The fight against cartels: a transatlantic perspective by Dr. Mantovani, Emilie Dargaud (University of Lyon) and Carlo Reggiani (University of Manchester).
Dr. Andrea Mantovani began his talk by explaining the significance of the questions posed above.
On February 4, 2014 Daniel Levy, professor of economics at Bar Ilan University and Emory University and member of ISET’s International Faculty Committee, presented his paper “Asymmetric Price Adjustment in the Small", (that he co-authored with Haipeng Chen, Sourav Ray and Marc Bergen) to ISET professors, students and researchers.
Prof. Levy’s interesting topic and entertaining presentation kept the audience of the conference hall totally engaged throughout the seminar.
We have all noticed that some prices go up rapidly and go down slowly. This phenomena is explained by the so-called “rocket and feathers” effect.