Purpose: We model group advertising decisions, which are the collective
decisions of every single advertiser within the set of advertisers who are
competing in the same auction or vertical industry, and examine resulting
market outcomes, via a proposed simulation framework named EXP-SEA
(Experimental Platform for Search Engine Advertising) supporting experimental
studies of collective behaviors in the context of search engine advertising.
Design: We implement the EXP-SEA to validate the proposed simulation framework,
also conduct three experimental studies on the aggregate impact of electronic
word-of-mouth, the competition level, and strategic bidding behaviors. EXP-SEA
supports heterogeneous participants, various auction mechanisms, and also
ranking and pricing algorithms. Findings: Findings from our three experiments
show that (a) both the market profit and advertising indexes such as number of
impressions and number of clicks are larger when the eWOM effect presents,
meaning social media certainly has some effect on search engine advertising
outcomes, (b) the competition level has a monotonic increasing effect on the
market performance, thus search engines have an incentive to encourage both the
eWOM among search users and competition among advertisers, and (c) given the
market-level effect of the percentage of advertisers employing a dynamic greedy
bidding strategy, there is a cut-off point for strategic bidding behaviors.
Originality: This is one of the first research works to explore collective
group decisions and resulting phenomena in the complex context of search engine
advertising via developing and validating a simulation framework that supports
assessments of various advertising strategies and estimations of the impact of
mechanisms on the search market.

本文提出基于 EXP-SEA 的集体决策模型，支持对搜索引擎广告中集体行为的实验研究，发现社交媒体对搜索引擎广告产生影响，并探讨竞争程度和策略出价行为对市场绩效的影响。