Abstracts - 3rd USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce
Detecting Hit Shaving in Click-Through Payment Schemes
Michael K. Reiter
AT&T Labs - Research;
Vinod Anupam and Alain Mayer
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies
Abstract
A web user "clicks through" one web site, the referrer, to another
web site, the target, if the user follows a hypertext link to the
target's site contained in a web page served from the referrer's site.
Numerous click-through payment programs have been established on the
web, by which (the webmaster of) a target site pays a referrer site
for each click through that referrer to the target. However,
typically the referrer has no ability to verify that it is paid for
every click-through to the target for which it is responsible. Thus,
targets can undetectably omit to pay referrers for some number of
click-throughs, a practice called hit shaving. In this paper,
we explore simple and immediately useful approaches to enable
referrers to monitor the number of click-throughs for which they
should be paid.
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