Inefficiencies in Digital Advertising Markets

Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This article explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking, and ad fraud. Although these topics are not unique to digital advertising, each manifests in unique ways in markets for digital ads. The authors identify relevant findings in the academic literature, recent developments in practice, and promising topics for future research

Industry Restructuring, Mark-ups, and Exchange Rate Pass-Through

Consumer prices are not very responsive to movements in nominal exchange rates and their response has fallen in Canada since the mid 1980s. This paper explores two of the most likely explanations for this decline in exchange rate pass-through to consumer prices: (1) lower inflation and (2) restructuring in the retail sector. We believe that both explanations are important but our primary focus in this paper is on the second explanation. We discuss the restructuring that has occurred in Canadian retail and trends in mark-ups and concentration in that sector. We argue that to understand these trends, it is important to examine pass-through in industrial organization models with strategic elements. Finally, we present a series of such models and evaluate the effects of various forms of restructuring on mark-ups, concentration, and exchange rate pass-through.Pass-Through, Restructuring, Strategic Pricing, Mark-ups, Exchange Rates, Imperfect Competition

Amazon and Platform Antitrust

With its decision in Ohio v. American Express, the U.S. Supreme Court for the first time embraced the recently developed, yet increasingly prolific, concept of the two-sided platform. Through advances in technology, platforms, which serve as intermediaries allowing two groups to transact, are increasingly ubiquitous, and many of the biggest tech companies operate in this fashion. Amazon Marketplace, for example, provides a platform for third-party vendors to sell directly to consumers through Amazon’s web and mobile interfaces. At the same time that platforms and their scholarship have evolved, a burgeoning antitrust movement has also developed which focuses on the impact of the dominance of these tech companies and the fear that current antitrust laws are ill-equipped to prevent any potential anticompetitive behavior. Many of those who feel this way worried that American Express, which decided whether a plaintiff alleging anticompetitive behavior by a two- sided platform would have to show harm to both sides of the market to make a prima facie case, would give companies like Amazon even more power. This Note argues that while the case could be interpreted in such a way, because Amazon and similarly situated platforms possess a great degree of control over their users—in some cases competing with them directly—it would be unwise to do so

IPO Ready? Illuminating the Dark Box of Private Equity

The use of public equity data can help combat the challenges private equity funds currently face regarding data availability. The goal is to create a model to provide guidance to both investors and entrepreneurs in the decision-making process. The data gathered would provide insight on how close a private company is to a successful Initial Public Offering (IPO). The idea is that a model, showing the average financial metrics of companies within certain industries during an IPO, can provide new perceptiveness as to how the private company is performing

After the Gold Rush: The Boom of the Internet of Things, and the Busts of Data-Security and Privacy

This Article addresses the impact that the lack of oversight of the Internet of Things has on digital privacy. While the Internet of Things is but one vehicle for technological innovation, it has created a broad glimpse into domestic life, thus triggering several privacy issues that the law is attempting to keep pace with. What the Internet of Things can reveal is beyond the control of the individual, as it collects information about every practical aspect of an individual’s life, and provides essentially unfettered access into the mind of its users. This Article proposes that the federal government and the state governments bend toward consumer protection while creating a cogent and predictable body of law surrounding the Internet of Things. Through privacy-by-design or self-help, it is imperative that the Internet of Things—and any of its unforeseen progeny—develop with an eye toward safeguarding individual privacy while allowing technological development

Data standardization

With data rapidly becoming the lifeblood of the global economy, the ability to improve its use significantly affects both social and private welfare. Data standardization is key to facilitating and improving the use of data when data portability and interoperability are needed. Absent data standardization, a “Tower of Babel” of different databases may be created, limiting synergetic knowledge production. Based on interviews with data scientists, this Article identifies three main technological obstacles to data portability and interoperability: metadata uncertainties, data transfer obstacles, and missing data. It then explains how data standardization can remove at least some of these obstacles and lead to smoother data flows and better machine learning. The Article then identifies and analyzes additional effects of data standardization. As shown, data standardization has the potential to support a competitive and distributed data collection ecosystem and lead to easier policing in cases where rights are infringed or unjustified harms are created by data-fed algorithms. At the same time, increasing the scale and scope of data analysis can create negative externalities in the form of better profiling, increased harms to privacy, and cybersecurity harms. Standardization also has implications for investment and innovation, especially if lock-in to an inefficient standard occurs. The Article then explores whether market-led standardization initiatives can be relied upon to increase welfare, and the role governmental-facilitated data standardization should play, if at all

Tailored gamification and serious game framework based on fuzzy logic for saving energy in connected thermostats

Connected thermostats (CTs) often save less energy than predicted because consumers may not know how to use them and may not be engaged in saving energy. Additionally, several models perform contrary to consumers’ expectations and are thus not used the way they are intended to. As a result, CTs save less energy and are underused in households. This paper reviews aspects of gamification and serious games focused on engaging consumers. A gamification and serious games framework is proposed for saving energy that is tailored by a fuzzy logic system to motivate connected thermostat consumers. This intelligent gamification framework can be used to customize the gamification and serious game strategy to each consumer so that fuzzy logic systems can be adapted according to the requirements of each consumer. The framework is designed to teach, engage, and motivate consumers while helping them save electrical energy when using their thermostats. It is described the proposed framework as well as a mockup that can be run on a cellphone. Although this framework is designed to be implemented in CTs, it can be translated to their energy devices in smart homes

Investigating consumer expectations of convenience store attributes in emerging markets: Evidence in Chile

Convenience stores (c-stores) constitute a successful format in developed markets such as North America and Europe, but there is scant research in the retailing literature. Even less is known about convenience store behavior in emerging markets. This study attempts to provide a better understanding of consumer expectations regarding convenience stores in a Latin American context. Interviews were held with Chilean consumers to identify salient convenience store attributes. Further, a survey was applied to 400 consumers and results show that the salient attributes for Chilean consumers are related to the access dimension of convenience such as access to the store, parking facilities and hours of operation

Marketing and Data Science: Together the Future is Ours

The synergistic use of computer science and marketing science techniques offers the best avenue for knowledge development and improved applications. A broad area of complementarity between the typical focus in statistics and computer science and that in marketing offers great potential. The former fields tend to focus on pattern recognition, control and prediction. Many marketing analyses embrace these directions, but also contribute by modeling structure and exploring causal relationships. Marketing has successfully combined foci from management science with foci from psychology and economics. These fields complement each other because they enable a broad spectrum of scientific approaches. Combined, they provide both understanding and practical solutions to important and relevant managerial marketing problems, and marketing science is already very successful at obtaining unique insights from big data