Media

We study the role of commitment in communication and its interactions with rules, which determine whether information is verifiable. Our framework nests models of cheap talk, information disclosure, and Bayesian persuasion. It predicts that commitment has opposite effects on information transmission under the two alternative rules. We leverage these contrasting forces to experimentally establish that subjects react to commitment in line with the main qualitative implications of the theory. Quantitatively, not all subjects behave as predicted.

We study a stylized revenue maximization problem for a provider of cloud computing services, where the service provider (SP) operates an infinite capacity system in a market with heterogeneous customers with respect to their valuation and congestion sensitivity. The SP offers two service options: one with guaranteed service availability, and one where users bid for resource availability and only the “winning” bids at any point in time get access to the service.

This should be the golden age of demand research. Many of the constraints of the past have relaxed when it comes to data collection. Yet the methodologies of demand analysis created by thought leaders such as Lester Taylor (1972, 1974; Houthakker and Taylor 2010) have not grown at the same pace and are holding back our understanding and power of prediction. Demand research is, of course, highly important. On the macro-level, governments and businesses need to know what to expect by way of aggregate or sectorial demand, such as for housing or energy.

Generative AI’s recent advancements in creating content have offered vast potential to transform the advertising industry. This research investigates the impact of generative AI-enabled visual ad creation on real-world advertising effectiveness. For this purpose, we collaborate with a display ad platform and leverage a quasi-experimental setting that includes over two million ad-day observations by over seven thousand advertisers across nearly 50 product categories, encompassing more than 16 billion ad impressions and 116 million clicks.

From Netflix to Spotify to TikTok, consumers’ entertainment experiences increasingly revolve around personalized content. Does consuming personalized content in a specific entertainment domain influence the likelihood of consumers discussing that domain overall, beyond the specific content they engage with? Across eleven experiments, we investigate the impact of personalized content in the music and short-form video domains (i.e., content that feels tailored to one’s tastes) on the intent to discuss domain-related topics. We find that the impact of consuming personalized content (vs.