AbstractThis paper investigates the incidence of limited attention in a high-stakes business setting: a bar owner may be unable to purge transitory shocks from noisy profit signals when deciding whether to exit. Combining a 24-year monthly panel on the alcohol revenues from every bar in Texas with weather data, we find suggestive evidence that inexperienced, distantly located owners may overreact to the transitory component of revenue relative to the persistent component. This apparent asymmetric response is muted under higher revenue fluctuations. We formulate and estimate a structural model to endogenize attention allocation by owners with different thinking cost. Under the assumptions of the model, we find that 3.9% bars make incorrect exit decisions due to limited attention. As exits are irreversible, permanent decisions, small mistakes at the margin interpreting profit signals can lead to large welfare losses for entrepreneurs.

This paper documents the differences in pricing strategies between online and offline (brick-and-mortar) channels. We collect price data for identical products from leading online grocery retailers in the United States and complement it with offline data for the same products from scanner data. Our findings reveal a consistent pattern: online retailers exhibit higher price dispersion than their offline counterparts. More specifically, online grocers employ price algorithms that amplify price discrimination in three key dimensions: (1) over time (through frequent price changes), (2) across locations (by charging varying prices based on delivery zipcodes), and (3) across sellers (by setting dispersed prices for identical products across rival retailers).

Customer lifetime value (CLV) modeling underpins modern marketing analytics, enabling the development of tailored customer relationship management strategies based on the predicted future value of their customers. As part of Amperity’s enterprise customer data platform (CDP), we deploy and maintain a CLV prediction system that caters to a rapidly growing list of brands across various industries, purchase behaviors, and scales. Given the impracticality of developing bespoke models for each brand, our solution must be adaptive, generalizable, and high-performing ”out of the box”. Furthermore, our platform demands daily prediction updates to facilitate prompt marketing decisions. This paper introduces a turnkey CLV prediction system that achieves state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of brands. This system has several contributions: 1) the use of encodings and embeddings to incorporate signals from high-cardinality data; 2) a multi-stage churn-CLV modeling framework that augments additional flexibility in adjusting churn probabilities, subsequently reducing CLV prediction errors while maintaining a synergistic learning process; 3) a feature-weighted ensemble of both generative and discriminative models to accommodate diverse underlying purchase patterns. Empirical results show that our enhanced model consistently surpasses benchmark performances for twelve retail brands across six evaluation intervals from June 2020 to September 2022.

AbstractOften marketers face the challenge of how to communicate best with the customers who have the right responsibilities, influence or purchasing power, especially in business-to-business (B2B) settings. For example, B2B marketers selling software and IT need to identify IT decision-makers (ITDMs) within organizations. The modern digital environment in theory allows marketers to target individuals in organizations through specifically designed third-party audience segments based on deterministic prospect lists or probabilistic inference. However, in this paper we show that in our context, such ‘off-the-shelf’ segments perform no better at reaching the right person than random prospecting. We present evidence that even deterministic attribute information is flawed for ITDM identification, and that the poor campaign results can be partly linked to incorrect assignment of established prospect profiles to online identifiers. We then use access to our publisher network data to investigate what would happen if the advertiser had used first-party data that are less susceptible to the identified issues. We demonstrate that first-party demographics or contextual information allows advertisers and publishers to outperform both third-party ITDM audience segments and random prospecting. Our findings have implications for understanding the shift in digital advertising away from third-party cookie tracking, and how to execute digital marketing in the context of broad privacy regulation.