Related papers: Consumer Manipulation via Online Behavioral Advert…
Online advertising has become the backbone of the Internet economy by revolutionizing business marketing. It provides a simple and efficient way for advertisers to display their advertisements to specific individual users, and over the last…
Data is the new oil; this refrain is repeated extensively in the age of internet tracking, machine learning, and data analytics. As data collection becomes more personal and pervasive, however, public pressure is mounting for privacy…
This PhD thesis discusses how European law could improve privacy protection in the area of behavioural targeting. Behavioural targeting, also referred to as online profiling, involves monitoring people's online behaviour, and using the…
Can large language models (LLMs) accurately simulate the next web action of a specific user? While LLMs have shown promising capabilities in generating ``believable'' human behaviors, evaluating their ability to mimic real user behaviors…
We analyze the value to e-commerce website operators of offering privacy options to users, e.g., of allowing users to opt out of ad targeting. In particular, we assume that site operators have some control over the cost that a privacy…
Information about millions of people is collected for behavioural targeting, a type of marketing that involves tracking people's online behaviour for targeted advertising. It is hotly debated whether data protection law applies to…
Online controlled experiments are the primary tool for measuring the causal impact of product changes in digital businesses. It is increasingly common for digital products and services to interact with customers in a personalised way. Using…
Data aggregators collect large amount of information about individual users and create detailed online behavioral profiles of individuals. Behavioral profiles benefit users by improving products and services. However, they have also raised…
As the largest e-commerce platform, Taobao helps advertisers reach billions of search queries each day via sponsored search, which has also contributed considerable revenue to the platform. An efficient bidding strategy to cater to diverse…
Online Budgeted Matching (OBM) is a classic problem with important applications in online advertising, online service matching, revenue management, and beyond. Traditional online algorithms typically assume a small bid setting, where the…
Today's largest technology corporations, especially ones with consumer-facing products such as social media platforms, use a variety of unethical and often outright illegal tactics to maintain their dominance. One tactic that has risen to…
As e-commerce rapidly integrates artificial intelligence for content creation and product recommendations, these technologies offer significant benefits in personalization and efficiency. AI-driven systems automate product descriptions,…
E-commerce businesses employ recommender models to assist in identifying a personalized set of products for each visitor. To accurately assess the recommendations' influence on customer clicks and buys, three target areas -- customer…
We need to rethink our approach to defend privacy on the internet. Currently, policymakers focus heavily on the idea of informed consent as a means to defend privacy. For instance, in many countries the law requires firms to obtain an…
The real-time bidding (RTB), aka programmatic buying, has recently become the fastest growing area in online advertising. Instead of bulking buying and inventory-centric buying, RTB mimics stock exchanges and utilises computer algorithms to…
This paper critically analyses the "attention economy" within the framework of cognitive science and techno-political economics, as applied to both human and machine interactions. We explore how current business models, particularly in…
Classification algorithms are increasingly used in areas such as housing, credit, and law enforcement in order to make decisions affecting peoples' lives. These algorithms can change individual behavior deliberately (a fraud prediction…
We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices,…
While advertising has become commonplace in today's online interactions, there is a notable dearth of research investigating the extent to which browser fingerprinting is harnessed for user tracking and targeted advertising. Prior studies…
Adolescents spend an increasing amount of their time in digital environments where their still-developing cognitive capacities leave them unable to recognize or resist commercial persuasion. Article 28(2) of the DSA responds to this…