Courses/CS 461/Museum of unintended consequences/Under-priced and over-priced resources
From CSWiki
Is there any doubt that if a resource is made available (in a mechanical and impersonal way—and that is probably important) for less than it's market price, that availability will be exploited. That is, whatever the intent in making the resource available at a subsidized price, it will be consumed for reasons that go beyond that intent. This is true whether the resource is made available by a government or non-government organization.
Similarly, if a mechanism is created to purchase a resource (in a mechanical and impersonal way—and that is probably important) for greater than its market price, that mechanism will be exploited. Again, whatever the intent in offering to purchase the resource at an inflated price, the resource will be offered for reasons that go beyond that intent. This is true whether the resource is made available by a government or non-government organization.
Neither of these is surprising. When programs of this sort are put in place, care is generally taken in an attempt to ensure that the program is not misused. These protections are more or less effective depending on the program.
Click fraud is the use of a computer to "click" on an ad thereby generating income for the page on which the ad is displayed. This summary is from the ACM News Service. The full article is here.
The lucrative nature of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, in which search engines charge a fee from advertisers every time a surfer clicks on their links, has spawned an insidious form of exploitation called click fraud, in which scammers click the ad sent by the search engine to their own Web pages. Indeed, observers such as search marketing consultant Joseph Holcomb believe click fraud threatens the entire PPC industry. To shore up customer confidence in the wake of click fraud's growing sophistication, search engines may have to add more transparency. Click farms run by unsavory companies in India employ people who click on ads 24/7, while companies targeting rivals may practice "impression fraud," in which they repeatedly reload a search engine page hosting a competitor's ad so that the ad might be eliminated. Available for download on the Internet is click fraud software that can supposedly mask clicks' point of origin, while scammers are setting up bogus blogs that automatically produce content by incessantly duplicating bits from other Web sites, inserting popular keywords, and then signing up the hodgepodge as a search engine affiliate. Owners of zombie networks have also recently started to practice click fraud by programming hijacked machines to randomly create clicks from all over the world, which complicates identification. Symantec security architect Elias Levy notes that the damage to the PPC industry would be far worse if scammers targeted the entire PPC system rather than individual advertisers. Most companies that promote anti-click fraud services simply outsource the job of studying internal logs for signs of duplicity, and PPC inventor Bill Gross thinks advertisers will eventually transition from PPC to cost-per-action, a model in which advertisers are only charged when a click leads to a purchase or other specified outcome.
