A Game of Clicks: Economic Incentives to Fight Click Fraud in Ad Networks *

ABSTRACT Ad networks use revenue sharing and effective filtering of fraudulent clicks to attract publishers. We develop a simple Hotelling competition-based game-theoretic model to study the effect of competition along these dimensions. We compute the Nash equilibrium strategy for two ad networks that compete for publishers. We then investigate how the preferences of the publishers and the quality of the ad networks affect the market share and the strategies chosen at equilibrium