Many companies are not satisfied with collecting only the personal information that customers provide during a transaction or sign-up, or even the additional personal information they collect about the customer’s activities on the company’s own website or app. Instead, there is a common...

Advertising to children has long been one of the most controversial areas of marketing. The debate ranges from whether or not it is even ethical to advertise to children and includes the types of advertising practices that might be considered ethical. At the center of this dispute is food...

On many multi-sided app platforms, the supply-side monetizes their work with targeted advertising. The targeting of ads has raised concerns over user privacy and has led to calls for platform firms and regulators to bar this practice. Important for this debate is to understand the consequences...

We examine how to learn personalized customer retention strategies when customers' intentions to purchase evolve over time. Working with a Japanese online platform, we first implement a large-scale randomized experiment, in which coupons are randomly sent to first-time buyers at different times....

Advances in data collection and algorithms help advertisers to better target individual consumers by predicting each consumer's preferences. We first show that when consumers have uncertainties about their preferences, an ad targeted to a consumer carries an implicit message: the algorithm...

The Pareto Principle, known as the 80/20 rule, predicts that most sales generate from a minority of buyers. Further, consumer theory stipulates certain shoppers have a preference to consume experience versus tangible goods. Some people value the consumption of experience due to lifestyle and...

Purpose The performance of behavioral targeting (BT) mainly relies on the effectiveness of user classification since advertisers always want to target their advertisements to the most relevant users. In this paper, the authors frame the BT as a user classification problem and describe a machine...