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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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Last changed: 9 Apr 2002 ml
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