Bernd Skiera

Goethe University Frankfurt · Department of Marketing

Privacy regulations often necessitate a balance between safeguarding consumer privacy and preventing economic losses for firms that utilize consumer data. However, little empirical evidence exists on how such laws affect firm performance. This study aims to fill that gap by quantifying the impact of the European Union's General Data Protection Regu...

This study explores the impact of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), introduced on May 25th, 2018, on online trackers, vital elements in the online advertising ecosystem. Using a difference-in-differences approach with a balanced panel of 294 publishers, we compare publishers subject to the GDPR with those unaffected (the control group)...

Purpose Large digital platforms face intense scrutiny over self-preferencing, which involves a platform provider favoring its own offers over those of competitors. In online marketplaces, also called retail or e-commerce platforms, much of the academic and regulatory debate focuses on determining whether the marketplace provider gives preference to...

Uplift modeling, also referred to as heterogeneous treatment effect estimation, is a machine learning technique utilized in marketing for estimating the incremental impact of treatment on the response of each customer. Uplift models face a fundamental challenge in causal inference because the variable of interest (i.e., the uplift itself) remains u...

This article describes a data-driven case study for teaching and assessing students’ skills in marketing analytics, specifically in pricing. This case study combines teaching econometrics to analyze data and substantive marketing to derive managerial insights. The econometric challenge requires students to set up and implement a regression analysis...

Digital platforms use recommendations to facilitate the exchange between platform actors, such as trade between buyers and sellers. Platform actors expect, and legislators increasingly require that competition, including recommendations, are fair - especially for a market-dominating platform on which self-preferencing could occur. However, testing...

Regulators and browsers increasingly restrict user tracking to protect users privacy online. Such restrictions also have economic implications for publishers that rely on selling advertising space to finance their business, including their content. According to an analysis of 42 million ad impressions related to 111 publishers, when user tracking i...

SalesTech, hier als Einsatz von Technologie zur Verbesserung des (persönlichen) Vertriebs bezeichnet, bietet viele Möglichkeiten, aber funktioniert nur bei einer Integration der Daten vieler Systeme, die den Vertrieb unterstützen. Der Beitrag zeigt, wie eine solche Integration mit Enterprise iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) („EiPaaS“) erfo...

Regulators worldwide have been implementing different privacy laws. They vary in their impact on the value for advertisers, publishers and users, but not much is known about these differences. This article focuses on three important privacy laws (i.e., General Data Protection Regulation [GDPR], California Consumer Privacy Act [CCPA] and Personal In...

Review platforms often use transient status reward systems where the granted status is not permanent, and reviewers can experience gains and losses in status. To evaluate the effectiveness of such systems, review platforms need to consider a trade-off between the potential positive effects of a status gain and the potential negative effects of a st...

If service providers can identify reasons users are in favor of or against a service, they have insightful information that can help them understand user behavior and what they need to do to change such behavior. This article argues that the novel text-mining technique referred to as information-seeking argument mining (IS-AM) can identify these re...

Ad blockers allow users to browse websites without viewing ads. Online news publishers that rely on advertising income tend to perceive users’ adoption of ad blockers purely as a threat to revenue. Yet, this perception ignores the possibility that avoiding ads—which users presumably dislike—may affect users’ online news consumption behavior in posi...

What will you learn from this book? Why and how the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) impacts the online advertising market, particularly advertisers, publishers and users. How advertisers and publishers leverage users’ personal data to pursue their goals. Which aspects of the GDPR are most relevant for advertisers, publishers an...

Policymakers worldwide draft privacy laws that require trading-off between safeguarding consumer privacy and preventing economic loss to companies that use consumer data. However, little empirical knowledge exists as to how privacy laws affect companies’ performance. Accordingly, this paper empirically quantifies the effects of the enforcement of t...

Digitale Dienste ermöglichen eine flexible Gestaltung von Tarifen. Längst geht es dabei nicht mehr nur um die Festlegung der Preise, sondern wie die Leistungserbringung überhaupt ge-messen und abgerechnet wird. Die Preismetrik ist die Einheit, die Dienste-Anbieter zur Mes-sung der Nutzung einsetzen (z.B. bei Daten: pro Zeiteinheit für die Übertragu...

This article introduces three exemplary articles that speak to novel, current, and important issues in marketing and investor behavior. One proposes a novel measure of quality using warranties, another examines the context of common ownership, and another provides a sweeping review of the marketing-finance interface. In addition to introducing thes...

The product return rate (RR) is an important metric for retailers; even small RR changes can significantly impact retailers’ profit. Companies and researchers typically favor and employ one of three methods to calculate the RR: based on the number of returned items, these items’ revenue, or their profit contribution. Interviews with 24 managers and...

This article uses information from two data sources, Compustat and Nexis Uni, and textual analysis to measure and validate the brand focus and customer focus of 109 U.S. listed retailers. The results from an analysis of their 853 earnings calls in 2010 and 2018 outline that on average, both foci increased over time. Although both foci vary substant...

Prior studies indicate the protective role of Ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation in human health, mediated by vitamin D synthesis. In this observational study, we empirically outline a negative association of UVB radiation as measured by ultraviolet index (UVI) with the number of COVID-19 deaths. We apply a fixed-effect log-linear regression model to a...

Service providers often use minimum increments and billing increments to charge for higher usage than customers' true usage. Despite their popularity in business practice, research has largely ignored these increments and assumed that charged usage always equals true usage. We develop an overcharging index that represents the extent to which a cust...

Zusammenfassung Digitale Technologien begünstigen den Einsatz einer dynamischen Preisgestaltung, also von Preisen, die für ein prinzipiell gleiches Produkt unangekündigt variieren. Dabei werden in der öffentlichen Diskussion unterschiedliche Ausgestaltungsformen dynamischer Preise oftmals vermischt, was eine sinnvolle Analyse der Vor- und Nachteile...

Background. Prior studies indicate the protective role of Ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation in human health, mediated by vitamin D synthesis. In this observational study, we empirically outline a negative association of UVB radiation as measured by ultraviolet index (UVI) with the number of COVID-19 deaths. Methods. We apply a fixed-effect log-linear r...

Background: Research is ongoing to identify an effective way to prevent or treat COVID-19, but thus far these efforts have not yet identified a possible solution. Prior studies indicate the protective role of Ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation in human health, mediated by vitamin D synthesis. In this study, we empirically outline a negative association...

Many online news publishers finance their websites by displaying ads alongside content. Yet, remarkably little is known about how exposure to such ads impacts users' news consumption. We examine this question using 3.1 million anonymized browsing sessions from 79,856 users on a news website and the quasi-random variation created by ad blocker adopt...

Knowledge about the daily number of new infections of Covid-19 is important because it is the basis for political decisions resulting in lockdowns and urgent health care measures. We use Germany as an example to illustrate shortcomings of official numbers, which are, at least in Germany, disclosed only with several days of delay and severely underr...

This research examines the impact of online display advertising and paid search advertising relative to offline advertising on firm performance and firm value. Using proprietary data on annualized advertising expenditures for 1651 firms spanning seven years, we document that both display advertising and paid search advertising exhibit positive effe...

This article investigates consumer protection on Kickstarter—a popular and sizeable, yet largely unregulated reward-based crowdfunding platform. Specifically, the article focuses on Kickstarter campaigns’ use of price advertising claims (PACs) and their failure to honor the promised discounts. Analyses show that between 2009 and 2016, more than 500...

The proliferation of the Internet has enabled platform intermediaries to create two-sided markets in many industries. Time-series data on the number of customers on both sides of the markets allow platform intermediaries for estimating the direction and magnitude of network effects, which can then support growth predictions and subsequent informati...

Abundant evidence exists that expected utility theory does not adequately describe decision making under risk. Although prospect theory is a popular alternative, it is rarely applied in strategic situations in which risk arises through individual interactions. This study fills this research gap by incorporating prospect theory preferences into a dy...

Data is considered the new oil of the economy, but privacy concerns limit their use, leading to a widespread sense that data analytics and privacy are contradictory. Yet such a view is too narrow, because firms can implement a wide range of methods that satisfy different degrees of privacy and still enable them to leverage varied data analytics met...

Marketing investments represent an important component of corporate expenditures and off balance sheet, intangible market-based assets comprise an increasing share of a company’s market value. In recent years, there has been a renewed emphasis in demonstrating that marketing investments can translate into profitable growth. The challenges in market...

Skiera, Bernd / Reiner, Jochen/ Albers, Sönke (2018), "Regression Analysis", in: Homburg, Christian / Klarmann, Martin / Vomberg, Andreas (Editors): " Handbook of Market Research“

Hinz, Oliver / Skiera, Bernd / Barrot, Christian / Becker, Jan (2011), "An Empirical Comparison of Seeding Strategies for Viral Marketing", Journal of Marketing, 75 (November), 55-71

The ability to calculate and understand the profitability of deal-of-the-day promotions (DoDs) is of vital importance for merchants. It is also challenging because it requires these merchants to consider long-term, cross-selling, and cannibalization effects and select an appropriate discount for the promotion. The authors develop and implement a mo...

In diesem Beitrag stellen wir das MAROPO-Konzept vor, das wir gemeinsam auf Basis unserer unternehmerischen und wissenschaftlichen Erfahrungen für die Kunden unserer Firma, Marini Media GmbH (www.marini-media.de), entwickelt haben und das unseren Kunden hilft, die Herausforderungen im digitalen Vertrieb besser zu verstehen und somit Projekte und Im...

Driven by the low transaction costs and interactive nature of the internet, customer participation in the price-setting process has increased. Today, platforms such as eBay have popularized online auctions on a global scale, Priceline has made headlines with its name-your-own-price (NYOP) business model, and Humble Bundle has enabled independent mu...

Time-variant pricing plans in electricity markets aim to mitigate mismatches between demand and supply by incentivizing consumers to shift their demand from costly peak to cheaper off-peak times. Their implementation can be manifold; they could depend statically on the time of the day (i.e., time-of-use pricing) or adjust prices dynamically in near...

Driven by the low transaction costs and interactive nature of the internet, customer participation in the price-setting process has increased. These changes were first brought about by the rise of online auctions in the early 2000s, followed by the emergence of newer participative mechanisms. Today, platforms such as eBay have popularized online au...

Customers acquired through a referral program have been observed to exhibit higher margins and lower churn than customers acquired through other means. Theory suggests two likely mechanisms for this phenomenon: (1) better matching between referred customers and the firm and (2) social enrichment by the referrer. The present study is the first to pr...

There is strong empirical evidence that consumers discount at significantly higher rates than firms. Yet, most research abstracts from the effect of discount rates on marketing decisions such as pricing. We study the effects of a consumers' discount rate that is higher than a firm's discount rate on prices, profits and consumer surplus of complemen...

Investors, analysts, and regulators frequently advocate greater disclosure of nonfinancial information, such as customer metrics. Managers, however, argue that such metrics are costly to report, reveal sensitive information to competitors, and therefore will lower future cash flows. To examine these counterarguments, this study presents the first e...

Discrete choice experiments such as choice-based conjoint and dual response are popular preference elicitation methods, yet, they can suffer from context effects, extreme response behavior, and problems with estimating consumers’ willingness to pay accurately when the purchase probability is high. This study proposes two new features to avoid these...

Most event studies rely on cumulative abnormal returns, measured as percentage changes in stock prices, as their dependent variable. Stock price reflects the value of the operating business plus non-operating assets minus debt. Yet, many events, in particular in marketing, only influence the value of the operating business, but not non-operating as...

There is strong empirical evidence that consumers discount at significantly higher rates than firms. Yet, most research abstracts from the effect of discount rates on marketing decision variables such as pricing. We study analytically the effect of high consumer discount rates on prices, profits and consumer surplus of complementary products in fou...

Increasing global digitalization brings huge amounts of data. Finding a successful way to handle all this data and to transform it into real insights will be a critical success factor in the future. The biggest challenge for data science applications in marketing is that many marketing people studied marketing because they no longer wanted to do ma...

Low interest rates and sluggish economic growth are not exactly ideal conditions for the financial services industry. Almost daily we are confronted with reports of inadequate capital bases, declining earnings, and layoffs at banks. But while many traditional retail banks are struggling with a business downturn, the direct bank market is enjoying s...

In large markets comprising hundreds of products, comprehensive visualization of competitive market structures can be cumbersome and complex. Yet, as we show empirically, reduction of the analysis to smaller representative product sets can obscure important information. Herein we use big search data from a product- and price-comparison site to deri...

Deal-of-the-day (DoD) promotions are nowadays very popular. As a special form of a price promotion, they allow firms to offer products at substantial price discounts, usually at or above 50%, for a very limited period of time, usually between one and seven days. Conventional wisdom suggests that both characteristics, high discount levels and tight...

Advance payment systems represent a pricing innovation, in which companies predict customers’ future consumption for the following year and then bill a series of monthly, uniform advance payments. Any difference between predicted and actual consumption gets settled at the end of the year with a refund or extra payment. Companies thus gain earlier a...

Real-time bidding enables advertisers to buy impressions (displays of an ad) in fully-automated real-time auctions performed on ad exchanges. Given that thousands of impressions are auctioned per second, advertisers use bidding algorithms that enable them to avoid exhausting their advertising budgets prematurely and to maintain continuous advertisi...

Advance payment systems represent a pricing innovation, in which companies predict customers’ future consumption for the following year and then bill a series of monthly, uniform advance payments. Any difference between predicted and actual consumption gets settled at the end of the year with a refund or extra payment. Companies thus gain earlier a...

We analyze how Facebook use and students’ social network positions within it relate to their academic performance. We use a unique data set obtained from a survey of students’ perceptions, actual Facebook connections to measure social network positions, and objective grades provided by the university registrar to measure academic performance. We fi...

Self-explicated approaches are popular preference measurement approaches for products with many attributes. This article classifies previous self-explicated approaches according to their evaluation types, i.e. trade-off- versus non-trade-off-based, and outlines their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, it proposes a new method, the presorted...

Targeting the "right" consumers is a core part of marketing. Whereas existing techniques to identify these consumers use demographic or psychographic variables or behaviors such as response probabilities, a proposed new targeting approach builds on consumers' incremental responses to identify them by their willingness-to-pay (WTP) ranges. These WTP...

This article compares prices per click and search engine advertising (SEA) effectiveness across six countries and 15 industries over four years. We find that prices per click are highest in the United States and United Kingdom, as well as in the financial and Internet services industries, but are lower in retail than in services industries. In high...

In advance selling, firms announce that they will charge different prices for those who buy early vs. those who buy late. Previous literature showed that advance selling allows for increased profits in a rather wide range of settings, which typically hold in many service industries. Despite ample evidence that consumers exhibit higher discount rate...

Pay-per-bid auctions are a popular new type of Internet auction that is unique because a fee is charged for each bid that is placed. This paper uses a theoretical model and three large empirical data sets with 44,614 ascending and 1,460 descending pay-per-bid auctions to compare the economic effects of different pay-per-bid auction formats, such as...

Pay-per-bid auctions require all bidders to pay for every bid. However, paying bidding fees without receiving the auction item in return often causes high dissatisfaction among losers, resulting in heated discussions and high churn rates. To reduce these negative reactions, pay-per-bid auctioneers created the Buy-Now feature, which allows losers to...