
Miklos SarvaryColumbia University | CU · Columbia Business School
Miklos Sarvary
About
71
Publications
16,557
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
5,338
Citations
Publications
Publications (71)
The paper explores the potential of Large Language Models to substitute for or to augment human participants in market research.
In recent years, ad blocking has become a significant threat to advertising-supported content. Adblockers typically negotiate with publishers, allowing some ads to go through in return for a payment, a practice called (partial) whitelisting in the industry. Ad blocking has a direct positive effect on consumers by reducing advertising intensity. On...
This article studies competition in contests with a focus on the news industry that is increasingly influenced by social media. The model assumes publishers to pick a single topic from a large pool based on the topics' prior “success” probabilities, thereby “chasing” potentially successful topics. Firms that publish topics that become successful di...
Building on results from economics and consumer behavior, the authors theorize that consumers' movement patterns are informative of their product preferences, and propose that marketers monetize this information using dynamic networks that capture co-location events (when consumers appear at the same place at approximately the same time). To suppor...
This paper studies competition between firms whose "products" (content) are generated by their customers (users). Video sharing sites, social networks, online games, etc. all rely heavily on user-generated content and have been growing significantly in the last decade. We model a Hotelling style market in which consumers have heterogeneous tastes a...
The authors theorize that consumers’ movement patterns are informative of their product preferences, and propose that marketers monetize this information using dynamic networks that capture co-location events (when consumers appear at the same place at approximately the same time). To validate this theory, the authors study mobile advertising respo...
Mobile advertising is one of the fastest-growing advertising formats. In 2013, global spending on mobile advertising was approximately $16.7 billion, and it is expected to exceed $62.8 billion by 2017. The most prevalent type of mobile advertising is mobile display advertising (MDA), which takes the form of banners on mobile web pages and in mobile...
The case describes the launch of a social media platform by the largest container shipping company in the world. Maersk Line garnered over 1 million fans on Facebook, 40,000 followers on Twitter, and 22,000 on Instagram. They also launched and became active on other social media networks such as LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ and created a social...
The case describes the launch of a social media platform by the largest container shipping company in the world. Maersk Line garnered over I million fans on Facebook 40,000 followers on Twitter, and 22,000 on Instagram. They also launched and became active on other social media networks such as Linkedin, Pinterest, and Google+ and created a social...
Markets for information products exhibit varying degrees of competition on both the supply and the demand side. This paper studies the potential complementarity of information products, equilibrium information buying behaviors and information price setting in such markets. Our game-theoretic model consists of two information providers selling imper...
Mobile advertising is one of the fastest-growing advertising formats. In 2013, global spending on mobile advertising will reach $13.6 billion and it is expected to exceed $36.9 billion by 2016. Interestingly, despite the rapid penetration of sophisticated handsets such as smartphones, a growing proportion of mobile advertising spending consists of...
We model competition among news providers as a contest where each firm chooses to publish on a topic from a large pool of topics with different prior success probabilities. If a topic is successful, firms that chose to publish on it share a fixed reward. We explore how increased competition (as measured by the number of firms and/or the share-struc...
An examination of the information industry, from Reuters to Facebook, and the special characteristics of information and knowledge markets.
We live in an “Information Age” of overabundant data and lightning-fast transmission. Yet although information and knowledge represent key factors in most economic decisions, we often forget that data, informat...
This paper studies the competition between Web 2.0 communities in a game theoretic framework. We model three important features of these institutions: (i) firms' content is usually user-generated; (ii) consumers' content preferences are governed by local network effects, and (iii) consumers have strong tendencies to multi-home. Our analyses reveal...
Abstract We study the diffusion process in an online social network, for which we know the individual connections between members. We model the adoption decision of individuals as a binary choice affected by three factors: (1) the local network structure formed by already adopted neighbors, (2) the average characteristics of adopted neighbors (infl...
Direct advertising—sending promotional messages to individual customers—is increasingly used by marketers as a result of the
recent improvements in consumer reachability. Most current methods to calculate optimal budgets for such advertising campaigns
consider customers in isolation and ignore word-of-mouth communication (WOM). When the customer ba...
The Internet has increased the flexibility of retailers, allowing them to operate an online arm in addition to their physical stores. The online channel offers potential benefits in selling to customer segments that value the convenience of online shopping, but it also raises new challenges. These include the higher likelihood of costly product ret...
Abstract Paid placements on search engines reached sales of over $10 billion in the U.S. last year and represent the most rapidly growing form of online advertising today. In its classic form, a search engine sets up an auction for each search word in which competing web sites bid for their sponsored links to be displayed next to the search results...
Abstract Consumers learn quality of many durable products through word�of�mouth information while firms launch new and improved products frequently in these markets. We examine an incumbent firm’s incentive to invest in R&D, and probability of its dominance in the mar� ket for new products where consumers rely on word�of�mouth information for their...
Consumers learn quality of many durable products through word-of-mouth information while firms launch new and improved products
frequently in these markets. This paper examines firm incentives to invest in R&D to compete for patents in makets where consumers
rely on word-of-mouth information and have expectations about the new products before launc...
We develop a spreading activation model, which we call the category activation model, to predict where within a category structure consumers are likely to position a subcategory that they have created to accommodate a new hybrid product. Based on this model, we hypothesize that the probability that an individual will position a new category subordi...
Media firms compete in two connected markets. They face rivalry for the sale of content to consumers, and at the same time, they compete for advertisers seeking access to the attention of these consumers. We explore the implications of such two-sided competition on the actions and source of profits of media firms. One main conclusion we reach is th...
The profitability of remanufacturing systems for different cost, technology, and logistics structures has been extensively investigated in the literature. We provide an alternative and somewhat complementary approach that considers demand-related issues, such as the existence of green segments, original equipment manufacturer competition, and produ...
Many new products (e.g., PDA phones) share features with multiple categories, but are also substantially different from each of these categories. When consumers encounter such a product, they may create a new subcategory (e.g., smart phones) to accommodate it. In such situations, consumers must decide where within the category structure to position...
We model the commercial World Wide Web as a directed graph that emerges as the equilibrium of a game in which utility maximizing websites purchase (advertising) in-links from each other while also setting the price of these links. In equilibrium, higher content sites tend to purchase more advertising links (mirroring the Dorfman-Steiner rule) while...
Product and waste take-back is becoming more regulated by countries to protect the environment. Such regulation puts an economic burden on firms, while creating fairness concerns and potentially even missing its primary target: environmental benefits. This research discusses the economic and environmental impacts of extended producer responsibility...
Bias in the market for news is well-documented. Recent research in economics explains the phenomenon by assuming that consumers want to read (watch) news that is consistent with their tastes or prior beliefs rather than the truth. The present paper builds on this idea but recognizes that (i) besides “biased” consumers, there are also “conscientious...
Theoretical work on the pricing of information reveals that competition between independent information sellers can result in prices that are negatively related to the quality or reliability of the information. The theory argues that when information products are unreliable (low quality), independent products become complements, and competition can...
About this book
Understanding the mechanism of a socio-economic system requires more than an understanding of the individuals that comprise the system. It also requires understanding how individuals interact with each other, and how the agg- gated outcome can be more than the sum of individual behaviors. This book contains the papers fostering the...
A general theory of cultural evolution is formulated using a cognitive dimension reduction scheme. Rational but cognitively
limited agents iteratively invent and redefine abstract concepts in order to best represent their natural and social environment.
These concepts are used for decision making and determine the agents’ overall behavior. The coll...
Previous studies on international marketing have typically asked the question: “how is the demand characterized across countries?” Such analysis is then used to provide guidelines for firms to enter new markets and/or to allocate marketing resources across countries. To provide such normative guidelines, however, one also needs to analyze the suppl...
Despite their obvious importance, not much marketing research focuses on how business-cycle fluctuations affect individual companies and/or industries. Often, one only has aggregate information on the state of the national economy, even though cyclical contractions and expansions need not have an equal impact on every industry, nor on all firms in...
We present a theory of cultural evolution based upon a renormalization group scheme. We consider rational but cognitively limited agents who optimize their decision making process by iteratively updating and refining the mental representation of their natural and social environment. These representations are built around the most important degrees...
The purpose of this paper is to understand buyer/seller adoption dynamics in independent, buyer-side B2B exchanges. In a stylized model, we assume that the main role of the exchange is to reduce search costs for buyers. Buyers and sellers enter or exit the exchange based on the relative economic surplus (loss) they receive inside vs. outside the ex...
This paper studies dynamic competition in markets characterized by the introduction of technologically advanced next-generation products. Firms invest in new product effort in an attempt to attain industry leadership, thus securing high profits and benefiting from advantages relevant for the success of future product generations. The analysis revea...
In this paper, we ask when will a firm earn more profits from selling the attention of its customers to advertisers than from selling the underlying product itself. In other words, when will a firm become an advertising "medium"? We investigate this decision as a function of the intensity and nature of competition. We show that regardless of inhere...
Despite its obvious importance, not much marketing research focuses on how business-cycle fluctuations affect individual companies and/or industries. Often, one only has aggregate information on the state of the national economy, even though cyclical contractions and expansions need not have an equal impact on every industry, nor on all firms in th...
The author studies the pricing of information with private value (e.g., management consulting, legal advice, medical diagnosis). Anecdotal evidence shows that in some of these markets, competing information sellers split the business to sell only first or second opinions to their customers. The author explains this pricing practice by showing that...
B2B exchanges are revolutionizing the way businesses will buy and sell a variety of intermediary products and services. It is estimated that most of the roughly $7 trillion worth of business transactions are likely to go through these new institutions within the next decade. This paper tries to understand the economics governing the transactions wi...
Returns policies are usually thought of as being a way to insure retailers against excess inventory. The work of Pellegrini (1986), Chu (1993), Lin (1993) and Padmanabhan and Png (1997) highlights the fact that there is considerably more to returns policies than just a mechanism for insurance. Our work identifies a heretofore undocumented rationale...
An analysis of how knowledge management (KM) affects competition among professional service firms such as consultants, accounting firms, or advertising agencies was done. The competitive dynamics and market structure that emerge as a result of firms competing with KM systems were also studied. The results focuses on the deployment of KM systems sug...
The authors propose a new methodology called the 'coupled-hazard approach' to study the global diffusion of technological innovations. Beyond its ability to describe discontinuous diffusion patterns, the method explicitly recognizes the conceptual difference between the timing of a country's introduction of the new technology (the so-called impleme...
We study global adoption processes where the units of observation are countries which sequentially adopt a particular innovation. Our goal is to provide a better understanding of how exogenous and endogenous country characteristics affect this diffusion process. We develop a general model of global adoption processes that allows researchers to test...
Conventional wisdom seems to claim that, by lowering the cost of distribution and by making search easier for consumer, the introduction of the Internet is likely to intensify price competition. This paper intends to challenge this view by asking: When and how is the Internet likely to decrease the level of price competition between firms? To answe...
This article proposes a method that overcomes a number of problems associated with new product diffusion models noted in the marketing literature. We illustrate the methodology in the context of better understanding global variances in new product adoption. Building on existing diffusion models and sample matching principles from international cons...
This article proposes a method that overcomes a number of problems associated with new product diffusion models noted in the marketing literature. We illustrate the methodology in the context of better understanding global variances in new product adoption. Building on existing diffusion models and sample matching principles from international cons...
Economic signaling theory suggests that consumers interpret price withinthe context of market conditions. Under specific conditions it predicts thatlow price may signal high quality. Results from an experiment designed totest the behavioral assumptions underlying this prediction indicate thatconsumers intentions to purchase conform to the predictio...
This paper presents an applied methodology to assist managers in strategically setting prices and allocating resources over the product, brand, or adoption (diffusion) life cycle. While substantial theoretical work has been achieved in this area in the management science and operations research disciplines, approaches which can be implemented as ma...
Selling information that is later used in decision making constitutes an increasingly important business in modern economies (Jensen [Jensen, Fred O. 1991. Information services. Congram, Friedman, eds. The AMA Handbook of Marketing for the Service Industries, Chapter 22. AMA-COM, New York, 423–443.]). Information is sold under a large variety of fo...
We study global adoption processes where the units of observation are countries which sequentially adopt a particular innovation. Our goal is to provide a better understanding of how exogenous and endogenous country characteristics affect this diffusion process. We develop a general model of global adoption processes that allows researchers to test...
This paper estimates the risk preferences of cotton farmers in Southern Peru, using the results from a multiple-price-list lottery game. Assuming that preferences conform to two of the leading models of decision under risk--Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT)--we find strong evidence of moderate risk aversion. Once we...
This paper presents a general model of global diffusion processes. The approach recognizes 'breadth' and 'depth' of adoption by first considering the sequential introduction of the innovation across countries (breadth). Given the time of introduction into a specific country, within-country diffusion (depth) is subsequently modelled. We illustrate t...
In this paper, we argue that the process by which abstract words acquire meaning in language is the result of competition between inter- acting agents in a community. We assume that individuals' restricted cognitive resources and limits on communication ability require the use of a reduced number of abstract concepts (words) to represent the rich r...
A working paper in the INSEAD Working Paper Series is intended as a means whereby a faculty researcher's thoughts and findings may be communicated to interested readers. The paper should be considered preliminary in nature and may require revision.
A working paper in the INSEAD Working Paper Series is intended as a means whereby a faculty researcher's thoughts and findings may be communicated to interested readers. The paper should be considered preliminary in nature and may require revision.
A working paper in the INSEAD Working Paper Series is intended as a means whereby a faculty researcher's thoughts and findings may be communicated to interested readers. The paper should be considered preliminary in nature and may require revision.
A working paper in the 1NSEAD Working Paper Series is intended as a means whereby a faculty researcher's thoughts and findings may be communicated to interested readers. The paper should be considered preliminary in nature and may require revision.
A working paper in the INSEAD Working Paper Series is intended as a means whereby a faculty researcher's thoughts and findings may be communicated to interested readers. The paper should be considered preliminary in nature and may require revision.