Three Essays on the Role of Individualized Data in Marketing
| Autor: | Wang, Yifei |
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| Rok vydání: | 2024 |
| Druh dokumentu: | Diplomová práce |
| Popis: | This dissertation consists of three chapters on understanding the opportunities and challenges of using individualized data in marketing, in the context of mobile economy, retailing, and education. The first chapter investigates the impact of market structure on the use and abuse of individualized data. In particular, I study how a shift in competition affects the nature and type of a firm's intrusion on consumers' privacy. I study this question in the context of Android app markets in China, and measure privacy by examining apps' permission requests. I investigate a 2017 regulation that reduced competition in censored app categories by prohibiting censorship-circumvention tools commonly used to access apps banned by the government. This regulation made banned apps less accessible and reduced the competition faced by permitted apps in censored categories but did not affect apps in uncensored categories. I use a synthetic differences-in-differences approach to Android permission requests by apps in censored and uncensored categories before and after the regulatory change. I show that reducing competition led to a significant increase in the permission requests by apps in censored categories. Empirically, I show that this increase in privacy-invasive behavior is due to treated apps' efforts to improve consumer engagement and monetize attention. The second chapter investigates the correlations in an individual customer's willingness to engage in search across different decisions and contexts. I show empirically show that the amount of search a customer engages in is correlated across seemingly unrelated tasks. I prove theoretically that this leads to correlations in customer decisions in seemingly unrelated product categories and contexts. I use these theoretical and empirical findings to explain the 'harbingers of failure' phenomenon documented in the recent literature, which is a series of findings showing there exist customers who systematically buy new products that fail across product categories and decision contexts. In this paper I argue that one latent characteristic that could contribute to the effect is a customer's willingness to engage in search and show how the theoretical and empirical findings on interrelated search of individual customers can explain the harbingers of failure phenomenon. The third chapter studies how access to digital educational content affects inequality in education. In particular, our analysis uses individualized data on children’s reading behavior from an eBook app to trace out both the short-run and long-run treatment effects of providing free access to digital reading resources to children with different socio-demographic backgrounds. We find that free access to digital content leads to a dramatic and immediate increase in reading time for treated children, and that this immediate effect is much larger for children from less developed regions with fewer educational resources. However, children's reading activities decline quickly after the start of their free access, and this decline is much faster for children from less developed regions. Further evidence suggests that children from more developed regions benefit more from the free access in the long run. Our mechanism analysis further reveals a nuanced complementarity between digital and non-digital education. Ph.D. |
| Databáze: | Networked Digital Library of Theses & Dissertations |
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