This is an open online academic seminar focusing on topics related to quantitative marketing.
The schedule is available as a Google calendar and you can sign up to receive updates here.
Please contact the organizers at virtualquantmark@googlegroups.com if you have any questions.
The Zoom link for all of the talks is: https://upenn.zoom.us/j/93394346729?pwd=SoVXVesbltpYbQxo9tbbPF6YgopDl3.1
We will post some recordings of talks at this channel and a full list of previous talks is available here.
Monday, September 15, Noon ET - Andrey Simonov (Columbia)
Social Media Advertising Loads as Prices
Abstract: Digital platforms charge users not in dollars but in attention to ad loads, the share of content occupied by ads. We examine how limiting ad targeting -- inspired by the impending US-EU regulations -- would alter this ad-load price and the welfare it buys. To do so, we run a field experiment on Facebook with nearly 2,000 participants in which users install a browser extension that (i) hides nearly all ads or (ii) replaces micro-targeted ads with generic ones. Factual ad loads vary dramatically across users—65% of the daily variance is between-person, consistent with price discrimination via attention. Hiding 89% of ads increases time on the platform by 12%, implying a −0.13 elasticity. Removing ad targeting decreases the number of ad clicks by 85% but has a negligible effect on time on the platform. Neither treatment measurably changes willingness to accept social media deactivation for four weeks. We use the estimates to simulate counterfactual scenarios where Facebook changes its monetization strategy from an ad-funded to subscription model under different ability to personalize ads.
Monday, September 29, Noon ET - Adam Rosenberg (Yale)
Monday, October 13, Noon ET - Mingkyung Kim (CMU)
Monday, October 27, Noon ET - Kevin Lee (Michigan)
Monday, November 3, Noon ET - Joonhwi Joo (UT Dallas)
Monday, November 10, Noon ET - Samsun Knight (Toronto)
Monday, November 17, Noon ET - Ashesh Rambachan (MIT)
Monday, December 1, Noon ET - Eric Bradlow (Wharton)
The seminars will last for 60 minutes with less formal conversation afterwards.
45 minutes of presentation
15 minutes of discussion.
Optional: speaker stays in Zoom for less formal conversation after the talk.
We also often invite additional panelists with expertise relevant to the talk to ask questions during the talk.
Please email the organizers if you'd like to be considered for a seminar talk. Please include an extended abstract or a working paper.
Yufeng Huang (Rochester), Zhenling Jiang (Wharton UPenn), Emaad Manzoor (Cornell), Olivia Natan (Berkeley), Hortense Fong (Columbia), Avner Strulov-Shlain (Booth)
Founding team: Dean Eckles (MIT Sloan), Andrey Fradkin (BU Questrom), Ayelet Israeli (HBS), Andrey Simonov (CBS), Raluca Ursu (NYU Stern)
virtualquantmark@googlegroups.com