Detecting hit shaving in click-through payment schemes

  • Authors:
  • Michael K. Reiter;Vinod Anupam;Alain Mayer

  • Affiliations:
  • AT&T Labs Research, Florham Park, NJ;Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ;Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies, Murray Hill, NJ

  • Venue:
  • WOEC'98 Proceedings of the 3rd conference on USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce - Volume 3
  • Year:
  • 1998

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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.