Leon Musolff, Business Economics and Public Policy, The Wharton School; Juan Camilo Castillo, Economics, University of Pennsylvania; Will Wang, Unity
Abstract: Advertising supports a significant fraction of the internet, enabling free web search and news services. These ads are intermediated by advertising networks, which assign ad slots to potential advertisers through auctions. In this project, we will collaborate with a large mobile advertising intermediation network to investigate (i) to what extent a reduction in available data (e.g., due to Apple’s new privacy policies) lowers the value created by mobile advertising and (ii) whether more decentralized markets are desirable after accounting for the trade-off between this decrease in value and having a more competitive market. We plan to obtain data on advertising bids, advertiser-reported performance targets, and advertising outcomes from our data partner and use structural modeling techniques from industrial organizations to analyze the market for mobile advertising intermediation.