Personalization in social retargeting - A field experiment

This study compares the effectiveness of product- and category-specific advertising personalization in Social Retargeting. Social Retargeting combines the features of social advertising, targeting consumers based on social connections, and retargeting, using consumers' browsing behavior to personalize ad content. We conducted a large-scale randomized field experiment in collaboration with a major e-retailer. Contradicting prior empirical findings, our results indicate that product-specific ads outperform less personalized category-specific ads. While theory suggests a positive effect, we find that social targeting decreases the performance of personalized ads. Surprisingly, socially targeted consumers are not more responsive to product-specific ads. We show that our results remain robust and are driven by ad personalization when controlling for temporal targeting and how deep consumers browse the e-retailer's website. Our study contributes to the IS and marketing literature related to personalization in digital advertising and provides valuable suggestions for firms' personalization strategies

The Implications of Advertising Personalization for Firms, Consumers, and Ad Platforms

The personalization of advertising offers firms tremendous potential. If done right, firms can address consumers with more relevant ads, leading to more positive consumer responses. Nevertheless, firms are struggling with how to design personalization strategies and face the challenge to correctly assess advertising effectiveness. With this research, we advance the understanding of advertising personalization and its implications for firms, consumers, and ad platforms. With the help of a large-scale field experiment, we present evidence for how firms should design their personalization strategies. We find that high levels of personalization specificity pay off for firms. At the same time, socially targeting personalized ads, where names of consumers' friends are included in the ad text, leads to less positive consumer responses. To advance the understanding of privacy concerns in advertising personalization, we conduct a lab experiment using eye tracking technology. Our findings reveal that firms cannot use intrusive ads that cause privacy concerns to attract consumers' attention. Such a strategy is harmful as it decreases consumers' overall attention towards ads, eventually leading to less positive consumer responses. An examination of contracts between firms and ad platforms exposes that these contracts might not be in the economic interest of firms. We conduct a large field experiment and our analysis reveals that currently implemented contracts between ad platforms and firms lead to an incentive misalignment that is harmful for firms. While ads generally increase consumers' likelihood to purchase, firms pay more for ads that are not providing higher value to them

Immunologische Aspekte der Nierentransplantation in der Schweiz 1981-1992.Swisstransplant Arbeitsgruppe Nierentransplantation [Immunological aspects of kidney transplantation in Switzerland 1981-1992. Swiss Transplant Work Group Kidney Transplantation].

Every year some 200-260 kidney transplants are performed in Switzerland, improving the quality of life of patients with end stage renal disease. The current organ shortage is delaying transplantation of the 400 patients on the waiting list, a situation which calls for optimal utilization of the available donor kidneys. It is well established that AB0-compatibility, negative cytotoxic crossmatch, and optimal immunosuppressive therapy including cyclosporin A are important for a favorable clinical outcome. To identify further factors influencing transplant outcome, we undertook a retrospective study of all 1656 transplants to which the above criteria applied. We defined transplants matched for at least 1A, 1B, and 1DR HLA antigen as the better matched, and the remainder as the less well matched grafts. In patients who were not or only weakly immunized to alloantigens, the 5-year graft survival probability was 0.78 versus 0.69 for the better versus the less well matched transplants (p < 0.005). The strongly immunized patients did not, however, show a significant association between the degree of HLA matching and graft survival, presumably because there were more immunized patients in the HLA matched group. As expected, the patients previously immunized to alloantigens showed significantly reduced graft survival early after transplantation. Positive CMV serology, sex mismatch, and cold ischemia time did not correlate with graft survival. Compared to results obtained in the USA or Germany, the survival time of donor kidneys transplanted in Switzerland was significantly increased. Factors contributing to the good results in Switzerland are discussed. Future goals are reduction of alloimmunization and optimized HLA compatibility

New sources and instrumentation for neutrons in biology

Neutron radiation offers significant advantages for the study of biological molecular structure and dynamics. A broad and significant effort towards instrumental and methodological development to facilitate biology experiments at neutron sources worldwide is reviewe