Search, targeting and media

搜索、定位和媒体

• 批准号: 1357811
• 负责人: Simon Anderson
• 金额: $ 14.59万
• 依托单位: University of Virginia Main Campus
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-06-01 至 2018-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1357811&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Search; targeting; media

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.

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互联网和新通信技术的经济分析。更广泛的影响在于采用新技术和模型来分析这些包含营销和媒体的现代传播现象，并强调公司之间的内在差异。首先，消费者在网络上搜索时经常遵循赞助商链接的显示顺序。此外，公司通过搜索引擎进行的位置拍卖支付更高的费用。提出了定向搜索下易于处理的定价模型，并将其与更好的位置拍卖相结合（这使消费者的搜索方式合理化）。尽管位置拍卖产生了正确的搜索顺序，但企业倾向于定价以阻止进一步的探索，因此消费者搜索不够。 ？更好的？公司（拥有较高质量的产品）倾向于为较早的位置出价更高，尽管产品价格往往会按照搜索顺序增加。对位置的投标影响了公司之间的位置相互依赖性，因为产品价格和利润取决于位置序列之前和之后的产品质量。其次，有针对性的广告将通过引发个人消费者的竞争来立即改变营销方式。分析此类目标的影响变得容易处理，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中）可以用简单熟悉的形式来表征。使用这种成分可以研究公司之间的价格竞争，从而通过有针对性的广告合理地预测随后的挖角和保留。在基准第一种情况下，市场基础价格对目标成本是中性的，因此企业会损失，而消费者会通过随后的额外竞争而获益。然而，在更广泛的背景下，尽管有额外的营销费用，但当目标定位促进更高的基础商店价格时，公司的状况可能会更好，因为竞争的边际发生了转移。这样一来，消费者的总体状况就会变得更糟，而偷猎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“双边”模式。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”。将平台的影响联系在一起的这种双向媒体市场的方法是什么？市场双方的行动表明它们是截然相反的。这就是“跷跷板”？结构性变化对市场的一侧产生不利影响，却可以使另一侧受益。在这种情况下，合并会以媒体经济学建模的经典方式恶化观众的福利，但当广告扰乱观众的注意力时，可以在替代规范中提高他们的福利。在这两种情况下，对广告商利润的影响都是相反的。该分析值得注意的是，它提供了异质公司合并的结果，并且是在双边环境中进行的。 所有三个主题都在提出如何顺利进展方面做出了基础性贡献，并强调了企业异质性对市场及其绩效的基本作用。该搜索框架提供了头寸拍卖和定价与顺序定向搜索的全面集成。这种设置描述了互联网上的搜索环境，并且应该为进一步的研究开发开辟道路。目标定位工作为大数据的结构实证分析及其企业在目标定位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参与者（观众、广告商和平台）的影响，并展示了这些影响如何联系在一起。