Search, targeting and media

搜索、定位和媒体。该项目创新了3个主题。该提案的智力贡献是推动对互联网和新通信技术的经济分析。更广泛的影响是采用新的技术和模型来分析这些围绕营销和媒体的现代传播现象，并突出公司之间的内在差异。首先，在网上搜索的消费者经常遵循赞助商链接的显示顺序。此外，公司通过谷歌进行的职位拍卖为更高的职位支付更高的价格。提出了定向搜索下易处理的定价模型，并将其与位置拍卖相结合以获得更好的位置(这使消费者的搜索方式合理化)。虽然职位拍卖会产生正确的搜索顺序，但公司往往会定价，从而阻碍进一步的探索，因此消费者搜索不够。？好点了吗？公司(拥有更高质量的产品)倾向于对较早的职位出价更高，即使产品价格往往按搜索顺序上升。由于产品价格和利润取决于头寸顺序中前后产品的质量，所以对空位的竞标考虑了各公司之间的头寸相互依赖关系。其次，有针对性的广告将通过诱导个人消费者的竞争来立即改变营销。分析这种目标的影响变得容易，因为它表明，每个消费者的预期利润(从技术上讲，在价格和广告的混合策略均衡下)可以用一个简单而熟悉的形式来描述。使用这种成分可以研究公司之间的价格竞争，这些公司通过有针对性的广告理性地预期随后的挖角和留住。在基准第一种情况下，市场基础价格对目标成本是中性的，因此企业损失，消费者从随后的额外竞争中受益。然而，在更广泛的背景下，公司可能会更好，尽管当目标定位促进了更高的基本商店价格时，尽管有额外的营销费用，因为竞争边际发生了变化。消费者的总体状况会变得更糟，而偷猎行为会进一步导致市场效率低下。第三个主题涉及媒体市场的竞争政策。通过广告收入融资的常见商业模式被称为？双面？市场结构，因为两个群体(消费者和广告商)聚集在一个媒体平台(网站、杂志、电视节目等)上该项目利用了一种新颖的聚合游戏？对这种将平台的影响捆绑在一起的双边媒体市场的态度？市场两边的行动，表明他们截然相反。这就是拉锯机？对市场一方产生不利影响的结构性变化可以使另一方受益的效果。在这种情况下，在经典的媒体经济学建模方式中，合并会恶化观众的福利，但在广告扰乱观众注意力的情况下，可以通过另一种规范来改善观众的福利。在这两种情况下，对广告商利润的影响都是相反的。这一分析值得注意的是，它在不同类型公司的合并中取得了成果，而且是在一种两面性的情况下。这三个主题都在提出如何轻松进步方面做出了基础性贡献，并突出了企业异质性的基本作用，这种异质性是市场及其表现的特征。搜索框架提供了职位拍卖和定价与顺序定向搜索的全面集成。这一设置描述了互联网上的搜索环境，并应为进一步的研究开发开辟道路。目标确定工作为大数据的结构性实证分析和公司在目标确定中的使用奠定了基础。应用于双边市场的聚合博弈框架强调了市场结构变化对三组经济主体(观众、广告商和平台)的影响，并展示了这些影响是如何联系在一起的。

Search, targeting, and media. The project innovates 3 topical themes. The intellectual contribution of the proposal is to push forward the economic analysis of the Internet and new communication technologies. The broader impact is in engaging new techniques and models to analyze these modern communication phenomena that encompass Marketing and Media, and in highlighting the inherent differences among firms. First, consumers searching on the web frequently follow the order in which sponsored links are presented. Moreover, firms pay more for higher slots via a position auction conducted by the search engine. A tractable model of pricing under directed search is proposed and integrated with a position auction for better slots (which rationalizes the way consumers search). Although the position auction induces the right order of searching, firms tend to price so as to discourage further exploration, and thus consumers don?t search enough. ?Better? firms (with higher quality products) tend to bid more for earlier positions, even though product prices tend to increase in the order of search. Bids for slots factor in the position interdependence across firms because product prices and profits depend on the qualities of products both before and after in the sequence of positions. Second, targeted advertising will imminently transform marketing by inducing competition for individual consumers. Analyzing the impact of such targeting is rendered tractable because it is shown that expected profits per consumer (technically, in a mixed strategy equilibrium of both prices and advertising) can be characterized in a simple familiar form. Using this ingredient enables the study of price competition among firms that rationally anticipate subsequent poaching and retention through targeted advertising. In a benchmark first case, market base prices are neutral to targeting costs, so firms lose and consumers gain through the subsequent extra competition. However, in broader contexts firms can be better off despite extra marketing expenses when targeting facilitates higher base store prices because the margin of competition is shifted. Consumers are then worse off in aggregate, and further market inefficiency is induced through poaching.The third theme engages competition policy for media markets. The common business model of financing through ad revenue is known as a ?two-sided? market structure because two groups (consumers and advertisers) are brought together on a media platform (web-site, magazine, TV program, etc.) The project exploits a novel ?aggregative game? approach to such two-sided media markets that ties together the impacts of platforms? actions on both sides of the market and shows they are diametrically opposed. This is the ?see-saw? effect that structural changes adversely affecting one side of the market can benefit the other side. In this context, a merger worsens viewer welfare in the classic way of modeling media economics, but can improve their welfare in an alternative specification when ads clutter viewer attention. In both cases, the effects on advertiser profits go in the opposite direction. The analysis is noteworthy for delivering results on mergers of heterogeneous firms, and in a two-sided setting on top. All three themes make foundational contributions in proposing how to progress tractably, and highlight the fundamental role of firm heterogeneity that characterizes markets and their performance. The search framework delivers a full-fledged integration of position auctions and pricing with sequential directed search. This set-up describes the search environment on the Internet, and should open the way for further research development. The targeting work sets the stage for structural empirical analysis of big data and its use by firms in targeting. The aggregative game framework applied to two-sided markets stresses impacts of market structure changes on three groups of economic actors (viewers, advertisers, and platforms) and shows how these impacts are tied together.