Research
My research investigates economic phenomena in the digital economy. I do so using novel big data sources and applying modern statistical methods.
On this website, you will find a summary of my current research projects that use search engine and Amazon product data to assess fair competition on digital platforms, as well as smartphone location data and large amounts of unstructured newspaper articles to estimate the effect of political conflict on consumption.
Working Papers
Measuring Fair Competition on Digital Platforms
Authors: Lukas Jürgensmeier and Bernd Skiera
Status: Revise & Resubmit at the Journal of Marketing
Abstract
Digital platforms use recommendations to facilitate the exchange between platform actors, such as buyers and sellers. Platform actors expect and legislators increasingly demand that competition, including recommendations, is fair, especially for a market-dominating platform on which self-preferencing could occur. However, testing for fairness on platforms is challenging because offers from competing platform actors usually differ in their characteristics, and many distinct fairness definitions exist. This article considers these challenges and develops a five-step approach to measure fair competition through recommendations on digital platforms. The article illustrates this approach by conducting two empirical studies that examine Amazon’s search engine recommendations on the Amazon marketplace for more than a million daily observations from three countries. It finds no consistent evidence for unfair competition in these studies. The article also discusses applying the five-step approach in other settings to ensure compliance with new regulations governing fair competition on digital platforms, such as the Digital Markets Act.
Keywords: Digital Platforms, Amazon, Competition, Antitrust, Search Engines
Conference Presentations
| Conference | Date | Location | Presenting Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17th Symposium on Statistical Challenges in Electronic Commerce Research (SCECR 2021) | June 2021 |
online |
Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| Interactive Marketing Research Conference (IMRC 2021) | October 2021 |
online |
Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| 13th Paris Conference on Digital Economics 2022 | April 2022 | Télécom Paris, Paliseau, France | Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| EMAC Doctoral Colloquium 2022 | May 2022 | Corvinus University, Budapest, Hungary | Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| EMAC Annual Conference 2022 | May 2022 | Corvinus University, Budapest, | Bernd Skiera |
| Munich Summer Institute 2022 | June 2022 | Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Munich, Germany | Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| ISMS Marketing Science Conference 2022 | June 2022 |
online |
Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| 20th ZEW Conference on the Economics of Information and Communication Technologies | July 2022 | ZEW — Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research, Mannheim, Germany | Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| SALTY 2022 — Quantitative Marketing Conference | September 2022 | WHU — Otto Beisheim School of Management, Düsseldorf, Germany | Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| WISE 2022 — Workshop on Information Systems in Economics | December 2022 | Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark | Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| ISMS Marketing Science Conference 2023 (special session for winners of the 2022 ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition) | June 2023 | Miami, United States | Lukas Jürgensmeier |
Funding
This project is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft—DFG) through grant number SK 66/8-1 within the project Visibility in Digital Markets: Risks and Economic Consequences.
Do Political Conflicts Influence Daily Consumption Choices?
Authors: Celina Proffen and Lukas Jürgensmeier
Status: Working paper (available upon request)
Abstract
Political conflict is a fixture of modern democracies. Such conflict shapes societal and political outcomes. But does political conflict with a foreign county also influence domestic consumers’ daily consumption choices? This study investigates whether consumers boycott goods associated with the opposing country in a setting where the conflict does not directly influence the characteristics of these focal goods. More concretely, we use the US-China trade conflict to analyze whether consumers reduce their visits to Chinese restaurants in the US when political relations deteriorate. We measure the degree of political conflict through the negativity in media reports and rely on smartphone location data of more than 11 million devices to proxy daily visits to over 193,926 restaurants in the US. We find that a deterioration in US-China relations induces a statistically and economically significant decline in visits to Chinese restaurants relative to non-Chinese restaurants in the US. At the same time, visits to other foreign cuisines also decrease substantially, while visits to traditional American restaurants increase. We interpret these results as evidence that reporting on international conflicts triggers ethnocentric consumer behavior.
Conference Presentations
| Conference | Date | Location | Presenting Author |
|---|---|---|---|
| EMAC Doctoral Colloquium 2022 | May 2022 | Corvinus University, Budapest, Hungary | Celina Proffen |
| EMAC Annual Conference 2022 | May 2022 | Corvinus University, Budapest, Hungary | Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| VfS Annual Conference 2022 | September 2022 | University of Basel, Switzerland | Celina Proffen |
| Economics of Media Workshop: Industrial Organization meets Political Economy | September 2022 | Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, Kingston, ON, Canada | Lukas Jürgensmeier |
| efl — the Data Science Institute, Jour Fixe | January 2023 | Frankfurt, Germany | Celina Proffen |
Funding
This project is funded by the efl – the Data Science Institute.