Search, targeting and media

搜索、目标定位和媒体。该项目创新了热门主题。该提案的智力贡献是推动了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包含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，在网络上搜索的消费者经常遵循赞助商链接出现的顺序。此外，通过搜索引擎进行的职位拍卖，公司为更高的职位支付更多的钱。提出了一种易于处理的定向搜索下的定价模型，并将其与更好的位置拍卖相结合（这使消费者搜索的方式合理化）。尽管位置拍卖诱导了正确的搜索顺序，但公司倾向于定价以阻止进一步的探索，因此消费者不愿意。我找够了。？更好吗?公司（拥有更高质量的产品）倾向于为更早的职位出价更高，即使产品价格倾向于按搜索的顺序增加。由于产品的价格和利润取决于产品在位置序列前后的质量，因此对位置的竞标会影响到公司之间的位置依赖性。第二，有针对性的广告将通过吸引个人消费者的竞争，立即改变营销。分析这种目标的影响是容易处理的，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战略均衡中）可以用一个简单熟悉的形式来表征。利用这一要素，可以研究那些合理预测随后通过定向广告挖角和留住人才的公司之间的价格竞争。在基准第一种情况下，市场基础价格对目标成本是中性的，因此企业亏损，消费者通过随后的额外竞争获利。然而，在更广泛的背景下，尽管额外的营销费用，当定位促进更高的基本商店价格时，公司可能会更好，因为竞争的边际被转移了。这样一来，消费者的境况总体上就更糟了，而偷猎行为又导致了进一步的市场效率低下。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”。市场结构，因为两个群体（消费者和广告商）在一个媒体平台（网站、杂志、电视节目等）上聚集在一起。综合游戏吗?如何应对这种将平台的影响联系在一起的双边媒体市场？双方的行动表明，市场是截然相反的。这就是跷跷板？对市场一方不利的结构性变化对另一方有利。在这种情况下，合并在媒体经济学建模的经典方式下恶化了观众的福利，但在另一种规范下，当广告扰乱了观众的注意力时，合并可以改善他们的福利。在这两种情况下，对广告商利润的影响都是相反的。值得注意的是，该分析提供了异质性公司合并的结果，并在顶部的双边设置。这三个主题都在提出如何可追踪地进步方面做出了基础性贡献，并强调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。搜索框架提供了一个完整的集成的位置拍卖和定价与顺序定向搜索。这种设置描述了互联网上的搜索环境，并为进一步的研究开发开辟了道路。目标定位工作为大数据的结构性实证分析以及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.