Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This paper explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking and ad fraud. These topics are not unique to...

Many new products (e.g., PDA phones) share features with multiple categories, but are also substantially different from each of these categories. When consumers encounter such a product, they may create a new subcategory (e.g., smart phones) to accommodate it. In such situations, consumers must...

This paper uses generative language models to substitute for human participants in market research. Such AI-based models can be used to generate textual continuation given a prompt. By carefully formulating the prompts, the paper shows that this new method generates perceptual maps that are...

One of the hallmarks of competitive interaction is each firm’s desire to differentiate from rivals. Although differentiation may be achieved through product related choices, advertising levels may constitute another key mechanism. In this paper, we examine under what conditions firms will...

We investigate the incentives for social communication in the new social media technologies. Three features of online social communication are represented in the model. First, new social media platforms allow for increased connectivity: i.e., they enable sending messages to many more receivers,...

We model competition among news providers as a contest where each firm chooses to publish on a topic from a large pool of topics with different prior success probabilities. If a topic is successful, firms that chose to publish on it share a fixed reward. We explore how increased competition (as...

Contextual advertising entails the display of relevant ads based on the content that consumers view, exploiting the potential that consumers' content preferences are indicative of their product preferences. This paper studies the strategic aspects of such advertising, considering an intermediary...