Course on Sponsored Search at UPenn

This appears to be a wonderful course. Has links to key articles and tries to blend science and practice in this rapidly developing field. In the process, VCG mechanisms are getting a lot of attention. "Keyword auctions for sponsored search, such as those offered by Google and Yahoo!, have become profitable and influential. They are also a fascinating new kind of market --- namely, a market in natural language phrases. While the structure of these new markets is evolving rapidly, there is also a diverse and nascent science emerging around the challenges and issues they raise. In this seminar course we will attempt to survey the many academic and commercial views of sponsored search that are under rapid development. The list of candidate topics includes an examination of the details of the various commercial auction mechanisms, their pricing schemes, and the analytic tools and data avaiable to advertisers to track and optimize their keyword portfolios; game-theoretic analyses of the equilibrium and other properties of keyword auctions; and interactions between the economic/financial and natural language aspects of sponsored search."