Avi Goldfarb

Online Display Advertising: Targeting and Obtrusiveness

We use data from a large-scale field experiment to explore what influences the effectiveness of online advertising. We find that matching an ad to website content and increasing an ads obtrusiveness independently increase purchase intent. However, in combination, these two strategies are ineffective. Ads that match both website content and are obtrusive do worse at increasing purchase intent than ads that do only one or the other. This failure appears to be related to privacy concerns: the negative effect of combining targeting with obtrusiveness is strongest for people who refuse to give their income and for categories where privacy matters most. Our results suggest a possible explanation for the growing bifurcation in Internet advertising between highly targeted plain text ads and more visually striking but less targeted ads.

Some Simple Economics of Crowdfunding

It is not surprising that the financing of early-stage creative projects and ventures is typically geographically localized since these types of funding decisions are usually predicated on personal relationships and due diligence requiring face-to-face interactions in response to high levels of risk, uncertainty, and information asymmetry. So, to economists, the recent rise of crowdfunding—raising capital from many people through an online platform—which offers little opportunity for careful due diligence and involves not only friends and family but also many strangers from near and far, is initially startling. On the eve of launching equity-based crowdfunding, a new market for early-stage finance in the United States, we provide a preliminary exploration of its underlying economics. We highlight the extent to which economic theory, in particular transaction costs, reputation, and market design, can explain the rise of nonequity crowdfunding and offer a framework for speculating on how equity-based crowdfunding may unfold. We conclude by articulating open questions related to how crowdfunding may affect social welfare and the rate and direction of innovation.

How is the mobile internet different? Search costs and local activities

We explore how Internet browsing behavior varies between mobile phones and personal computers. Smaller screen sizes on mobile phones increase the cost to the user of browsing for information. In addition, a wider range of offline locations for mobile Internet usage suggests that local activities are particularly important. Using data on user behavior at a (Twitter-like) microblogging service, we exploit exogenous variation in the ranking mechanism of posts to identify the ranking effects. We show that (1) ranking effects are higher on mobile phones suggesting higher search costs: links that appear at the top of the screen are especially likely to be clicked on mobile phones and (2) the benefit of browsing for geographically close matches is higher on mobile phones: stores located in close proximity to a users home are much more likely to be clicked on mobile phones. Thus, the mobile Internet is somewhat less “Internet-like”: search costs are higher and distance matters more. We speculate on how these cha...

Restructuring Research: Communication Costs and the Democratization of University Innovation

We report evidence indicating that Bitnet adoption facilitated increased research collaboration between US universities. However, not all institutions benefited equally. Using panel data from seven top engineering journals, Bitnet connection records, and a variety of institution ranking data, we find that medium-ranked universities were the primary beneficiaries; they benefited largely by increasing their collaboration with top-ranked schools. Furthermore, we find that the magnitude of this effect was greatest for co-located pairs. These results suggest that the most salient effect of lowering communication costs may have been to facilitate gains from trade through the specialization of research tasks. Thus, the advent of Bitnet -- and likely subsequent versions, including the Internet -- seems to have increased the role of second-tier universities in the national innovation system as producers of new, high-quality knowledge.

Advertising Bans and the Substitutability of Online and Offline Advertising

The authors examine whether the growth of the Internet has reduced the effectiveness of government regulation of advertising. They combine nonexperimental variation in local regulation of offline alcohol advertising with data from field tests that randomized exposure to online advertising for 275 different online advertising campaigns to 61,580 people. The results show that people are 8% less likely to say that they will purchase an alcoholic beverage in states that have alcohol advertising bans compared with states that do not. For consumers exposed to online advertising, this gap narrows to 3%. There are similar effects for four changes in local offline alcohol advertising restrictions when advertising effectiveness is observed both before and after the change. The effect of online advertising is disproportionately high for new products and for products with low awareness in places that have bans. This suggests that online advertising could reduce the effectiveness of attempts to regulate offline advertising channels because online advertising substitutes for (rather than complements) offline advertising.

Estimating the Value of Brand Alliances in Professional Team Sports

Brands often form alliances to enhance their brand equities. In this paper, we examine the alliances between professional athletes (athlete brands) and sports teams (team brands) in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Athletes and teams match to maximize the total added value created by the brand alliance. To understand this total value, we estimate a structural two-sided matching model using a maximum score method. Using data on the free-agency contracts signed in the NBA during the four-year period from 1994 to 1997, we find that both older players and players with higher performance are more likely to match with teams with more wins. However, controlling for performance, we find that brand alliances between high brand equity players (defined as receiving enough votes to be an all-star starter) and medium brand equity teams (defined by stadium and broadcast revenues) generate the highest value. This suggests that top brands are not necessarily best off matching with other top brands. We also provide suggestive evidence that the maximum salary policy implemented in 1998 influenced matches based on brand equity spillovers more than matches based on performance complementarities.

Geographic location and the diffusion of Internet technology

This study examines the sources of geographic variance in commercial Internet use. Until now, two opposing views have been argued on the relationship between Internet technology and economic agglomeration. One view, which we term global village theory, asserts that Internet technology helps lower communication costs and break down geographic boundaries between firms. The other view, labeled urban density theory, argues that the Internet follows a traditional pattern of diffusion - diffusing first through urban areas with complementary technical and knowledge resources that lower the costs of investing in new frontier technology. We provide a third view, industry composition theory, that asserts that demand for the Internet is increasing in location size because of the concentration of information-intensive firms in urban areas. We offer hard evidence on factors influencing the dispersion of Internet technology to businesses. We find no evidence for urban density theory in the diffusion of basic access and participation in the Internet network. We do find some evidence supporting global village theory for diffusion along this dimension. We also find that the pattern of adoption of frontier Internet technologies supports urban density theory not global village theory. Last, we show that business use of the Internet is significantly shaped by the prior geographic distribution of industry.

Are All Managers Created Equal

Some managers are better than others. Based on the cognitive hierarchy framework of Camerer, Ho, and Chong (2004), the authors develop a structural econometric model that estimates the level of strategic thinking. In the model, firms with a high level of strategic thinking are more likely to correctly conjecture the expected actions of their competitors. The authors apply this model to decisions by managers at 2,233 Internet Service Providers to offer their customers access through 56K modems in 1997. The model is validated by showing that firms with a higher estimated probability of strategic thinking were more likely to have survived through April 2007. The estimation results show considerable heterogeneity in the degree to which firms behave strategically and suggest that strategic ability affects marketing outcomes: a simulated increase in strategic ability means that fewer firms offer the technology to their customers.

Does Price Elasticity Vary with Economic Growth? A Cross-Category Analysis

How does price sensitivity change with the macroeconomic environment? The authors explore this question by measuring price elasticity using household-level data across 19 grocery categories over 24 quarters. For each category, they estimate a separate random coefficients logit model with quarter-specific price response parameters and control functions to address endogeneity. This specification yields a novel set of 456 elasticities across categories and time that are generated using the same method and therefore can be directly compared. On average, price sensitivity is countercyclical: It rises when the macroeconomy weakens. However, substantial variation exists, and a handful of categories exhibit procyclical price sensitivity. The authors show that the relationship between price sensitivity and macroeconomic growth correlates strongly with the average level of price sensitivity in a category. They examine several explanations for this result and conclude that a categorys share of wallet is the more likely driver versus alternative explanations based on product perishability, substitution across consumption channels, or market power.

Understanding the Inputs into Innovation: Do Cities Substitute for Internal Firm Resources?

We examine whether there is a trade-off between employing internal (firm) resources and purchased external (local) resources in process innovation. We draw on a rich dataset of Internet investments by 86,879 US establishments to examine decisions to invest in advanced Internet technology. We show that the marginal contribution of internal resources is greater outside of a major urban area than inside one. Agglomeration is less important for firms with highly capable IT workers. When firms invest in innovative processes they act as if resources available in cities are partial substitutes for both establishment-level and firm-level internal resources.