Cookies are small text files that hold a modest amount of data specific to a particular user and website. It is stored locally on a user’s computer. The website specifies what data should be stored in the cookie, such as user ID, session keys, or preferences. I really like this example: Imagine a website is like a hotel. The hotel wants each returning guest to have their room personalized to their requests each time they visit....

Market size and market share for adtech industry/online advertisement ecosystem The online advertising market is dominated by a few major players, with significant regional variations. The global online advertising industry continues to grow, at about $600 ~ $700 billion today, and showing no signs of slowing down [6]. Global market size of digital advertising. Source. The market is highly concentrated. Based on data in 2019, Google and Facebook (Meta) account for approximately half of the digital advertising global revenue [2]....

The AdTech ecosystem is rich, complex, and difficult to navigate. Demand-side platforms (DSPs), unless they are hidden behind another layer like Agency Trading Desks, act as intermediaries between advertisers and ad exchanges. They function similarly to the relationship between a stock exchange, consumers, and securities. DSPs depend heavily on third-party cookies. Through the process of cookie syncing, cookies and all privacy information are ultimately collected by DSPs. They use this data to segment consumers and sell these segments to advertisers, in addition to providing other services such as data management, analytic services, and insights....

Yes we’re talking about cookies. But before closely inpect our target Google, let’s take a step back for a higher-level view at the online advertisement industry to get a bigger picture—the AdTech ecosystem. The key of everything is programmatic advertising, and it is the main tool that distinguishes AdTech from MarTech (marketing technology). Programmatic advertising is the use of technology to buy and sell digital ads. Programmatic advertising uses an automated process to purchase digital ad inventory from across the web, mobile, apps, video, and social media....

Cookies, small text files stored on a user’s local computer, are pivotal in carrying information across the internet. This is because the HTTP protocol (the way we communicate with the web) does not retain information between sessions. To store and retrieve any information—even something as simple as what was entered before and after clicking the ‘search’ button—we and the web need cookies. This mechanism makes our browsing experience seamlessly smooth....

Optimizing Product Launches in the Presence of Strategic Consumers. By Ilan Lobel, Jigar Patel, Gustavo Vulcano, and Jiawei Zhang. Management Science 2016. DOI https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2189 The paper studies firm’s product launch policy. It is motivated by the industry example, where tech firms iteratively release new models of their products. For example, Apple releasing one new iPhone models almost every 12-18 months, or Nintendo’s upcoming switch 2 that has been overdued 7 years (still is though)....

Henri Biva. French artist, active around 1900s±, somewhere between post-impressionism and realism. This painting is one of Henri’s masterpieces that showcased the artist’s mastery in capturing warm natural light. Etang dans la brume (aka Pond in the mist), Henri Biva (1848 – 1929). Salon de Paris, 1910. Oil on canvcs (151cm•111cm). Now in Musée d’Orsa. IT IS THE OIL ON CANVAS THAT BIVA PRESENTED IN PARIS AT THE 1910 SALON UNDER THE NUMBER 206....

A .json file is a text file formatted in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). It is a lightweight data-interchange format, that is easy enough for human to read and write, but also easy for machine to parse and generate. JSON is frequently used to transmit data between a server and web applications, or using to store lightweight data. In Python, one can load JSON file using json library: import json with open('data....

In the spirit of Karl Lagerfeld who once said, “I like the idea of craziness with discipline,” it all started with an assignment from my professor about Google’s cookie and privacy policies. I was supposed to research how cookies influence ad targeting and how collected privacy data is processed, stored and used. But reading about it from all sources wasn’t barely enough for my appetite—so, I turned to something even more exhiliarting:...

Here’s a reallly cool paper. Bergemann et al. (2015) The Limits of Price Discrimination. AER. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1257/aer.20130848 ABSTRACT We analyze the welfare consequences of a monopolist having additional information about consumers’ tastes, beyond the prior distribution; the additional information can be used to charge different prices to different segments of the market, i.e., carry out “third degree price discrimination.” We show that the segmentation and pricing induced by the additional information can achieve every combination of consumer and producer surplus such that: (i) consumer sur- plus is nonnegative, (ii) producer surplus is at least as high as profits under the uniform monopoly price, and (iii) total surplus does not exceed the surplus generated by efficient trade....