"A generalized second-price (GSP) auction is the standard way to allocate search advertising slots on a search results page. In order to acquire slots, advertisers submit bids for a search keyword. Each time a search user sends a search query, an auction begins. The search engine sorts the bids and concludes the auction with the slot allocation. Currently, advertisers do not have access to the bids submitted by their opponents. In this dissertation, I used agent-based modeling to simulate auctions under different information disclosure policies. I investigated three information disclosure policies: no information disclosure, partial information disclosure, and perfect information disclosure. Under the no information disclosure policy, a search engine does not disclose bid information. Under partial and perfect information disclosure policies, a search engine announces bid statistics and bids from the prior round respectively. The simulated auctions ran in different scenarios, which were formed by varying values of several parameters. My goal was to learn about the effects of bid information disclosure policies on search engine revenue and surplus generation from these simulations. Through the simulations and analyses, I illustrated that a search engine can generate higher levels of revenue under the partial information disclosure policy than under the other two information disclosure policies. I also found that GSP auctions were relatively robust in terms of surplus generation."--Page ii.
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