Data Privacy Seminar: Alessandro Acquisti
The Data Privacy Seminar Series brings world-class privacy experts of diverse backgrounds and perspectives to share their points of view. In today's seminar, Alessandro Acquisti, professor information technology and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, will present "Behavioral advertising and consumer welfare: An empirical investigation."
This presentation provides an overview of Professor Acquisti’s work, done jointly with researchers Eduardo Mustri and Idris Adjerid, investigating the impact of behavioral advertising on consumer welfare in a within-subjects online experiment. While the vast majority of empirical work on the impact of online advertising focuses on click and conversion rates of behaviorally targeted ads, they propose a counterfactual approach, in which online consumers are presented with alternative offers: products associated with targeted ads they were served online, competing products, and random products. Participants are asked to compare these alternatives along a variety of metrics. Thus, they assess consumer welfare implications of behavioral advertising comparatively, in an ongoing online experiment that captures differences in participants’ purchase intentions and other product characteristics which can affect consumer utility.
Alessandro Acquisti is a Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at the Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University. His research combines economics, decision research, and data mining to investigate the role of privacy in a digital society. His studies have spearheaded the economic analysis of privacy, the application of behavioral economics to the understanding of consumer privacy valuations and decision-making, and the investigation of privacy and personal disclosures in online social networks. He has been the recipient of the PET Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies, the IBM Best Academic Privacy Faculty Award, and numerous Best Paper awards. His studies have been published in journals across multiple disciplines, including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the Journal of Economic Literature, Management Science, Marketing Science, the Journal of Consumer Research, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology. His research has been featured in media outlets around the world, including The Economist, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Wired, and 60 Minutes. His TED talks on privacy and human behavior have been viewed over a million times.
Register in advance for Zoom participation information.
This event is sponsored by iSchool, European Union Center