Workshop on Platform Analytics (WoPA)

The Workshop on Platform Analytics presents new scientific research on platform analytics.

Platforms enable direct interactions between agents. Marketplaces connect buyers and sellers; media platforms connect advertisers, creators and consumers; sharing platforms connect resource owners with resource users; app stores connect software developers and users. Network externalities distinguish platforms from traditional business models: Platform value to customers depends on how many other customers, of various types, are using the same platform.

Platforms have become pervasive in the digital economy. Most of the largest firms in the world are platforms, and there are also platforms of all sizes. Platform design enables valuable connections, platform policies structure customer transactions, and platforms remediate when things go wrong. Yet platform incentives may diverge from some customer interests, leading to some questionable practices. Policymakers at all levels are grappling with platform issues, suggesting a need for deeper understanding of platform topics.

"The purpose of knowledge is action." We construe Platform Analytics broadly as using data to improve decisions in a platform context. The decisions might be taken by platforms themselves, the customers they connect, policymakers or others. The data might come from within a platform or outside it, and the improvement may be from any party's perspective.

WoPA's goal is to improve scholarly communication about platform analytics. We seek to promote high standards of evidence, relevance, openness, inclusivity and multidisciplinarity.

We thank the USC Marshall Initiative on Digital Competition and INFORMS Society for Marketing Science for sponsoring the workshop dinner and need-based travel grants for doctoral students and postdocs.

Accepted papers are linked below. Past talks are on the YouTube channel.

Saturday, April 6, 2024

9:00 : Coffee, light breakfast

9:45 : Designing Quality Certificates: Insights from eBay
Presented by Xiang Hui, WUSTL
Discussant: Tomasso Bondi, Cornell
Session archive on YouTube

11:00 : A Framework for Detection, Measurement, and Welfare Analysis of Platform Bias
Presented by Imke Reimers, Cornell
Discussant: Dante Donati, Columbia
Session archive on YouTube

12:00 : Lunch, UCSD Faculty Club

13:30 : Algorithm failures and consumers’ response: Evidence from Zillow
Presented by Nikhil Malik, USC
Discussant: Puneet Manchanda, Michigan
Session archive on YouTube

14:45 : How Do Content Producers Respond to Engagement on Social Media Platforms?
Presented by Simha Mummalaneni, Washington
Discussant: Linli Xu, Minnesota
Session archive on YouTube

16:00 : Refreshment

16:40 : Unintended Consequences of Platform Monetization on Digital Cultural Markets: Evidence from a Natural Experiment on Goodreads
Presented by Shrabastee Banerjee, Tilburg
Discussant: Unnati Narang, UIUC
Session archive on YouTube

18:00: Dinner, UCSD Faculty Club

Sunday, April 7, 2024

8:30: Coffee, light breakfast

9:00 : Detecting and Mitigating Algorithmic Bias in Treatment Effect Estimation: Theory, Methods, and Empirical Evidence
Presented by Joel Persson, Spotify
Discussant: Michelangelo Rossi, Télécom Paris
Session archive on YouTube

10:15 : Content Generation on Social Media: The Role of Negative Peer Feedback
Presented by Varad Deolankar, Michigan
Discussant: Brett Hollenbeck, UCLA
Session archive on YouTube

11:30 : Personalized Rankings and User Engagement: An Empirical Evaluation of the Reddit News Feed
Presented by Alex Moehring, MIT
Discussant: Jia Liu, HKUST
Session archive on YouTube

12:40: Lunch, UCSD Faculty Club

14:10 : Advertiser Learning in Direct Advertising Markets
Presented by Carl Mela, Duke
Discussant: Nils Wernerfelt, Northwestern
Session archive on YouTube

15:30 : Attention Spillovers from News to Ads: Evidence from an Eye-Tracking Experiment
Presented by Andrey Simonov, Columbia
Discussant: Caio Waisman, Northwestern
Session archive on YouTube

17:00 Snacks at the Torrey Pines Gliderport, on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, weather permitting. Tandem flights available at own cost and risk.
Note: The cliff terrain is uneven. Consider appropriate footwear.

Registration is available at Humanitix. The process should be straightforward, but feel free to notify us of any difficulty.

Fees:
$99 doctoral students and postdocs,
$199 faculty and non-profits,
$299 industry.
$50 late registration fee after March 21.

Registration includes lunch and dinner buffets, including vegetarian and vegan options.

We recommend booking if you plan to attend as the event may sell out. 100% refunds, less any mandatory platform fees, will be processed automatically on the ticket sales platform until March 21. No refunds in the final 14 days.

Our sponsors have offered a budget for need-based travel grants for doctoral students and postdocs until March 21. To access, please ask a faculty member to email the organizers to briefly describe the need.

WoPA is an in-person event with no online or hybrid attendance option. We will post talk videos on the YouTube channel after the workshop.

Travel to San Diego

1. Southwest Airlines operates the most flights to/from San Diego (airport code: SAN) but requires a separate fare search.

2. The Tijuana International Airport (code: TIJ) is about a 40-minute drive from UCSD. A pedestrian bridge called the Cross-Border Express enables air travelers to disembark directly into the United States. Some international flights to TIJ are substantially cheaper than similar flights to SAN. SNA is another alternate airport within driving distance.

3. Travelers within Southern California may consider the Pacific Surfliner. Consult PacificSurfliner.com for travel advisories or closures due to cliffside erosion. We recommend the Solana Beach stop with a rideshare to campus.

Accommodation

There is no designated hotel for the workshop. We recommend booking early.

1. For those who prefer rideshare services, we recommend the Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines, as it's reasonably priced and nearby (1.2 miles / 1.9 km).

2. For those who prefer public transit and walking, we recommend the Residence Inn by Marriott or the Sheraton La Jolla. They are about 30 minutes walk from the workshop venue, mostly across campus, and 10-15 minutes walk from the Nobel Drive trolley station.

3. The nearest and highest-quality choice is Estancia La Jolla, a 10-minute walk. However, it is relatively expensive. Similar alternatives include the La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club and the Lodge at Torrey Pines.

Arriving at UCSD

1. The workshop will be held at the UCSD Rady School of Management at 5 Scholars Drive North. We recommend taxi, ride share or walking as campus parking is not always straightforward.

2. The UC San Diego Trolley Blue Line connects UCSD to Downtown San Diego near the airport. Trolleys run every 15 minutes and fares can be paid on the PRONTO app. We recommend using the trolley with two caveats. The UCSD Pepper Canyon stop is a 20-minute walk from the Rady School, including a hill. The trolley is usually busy and safe, but off-peak ridership can be unpredictable. The trolley does not run to the airport directly, but the Middletown Trolley Station is only a short walk from the airport's free Rental Car Shuttle stop at Admiral Boland Way, as described here.

3. Driving directions to the Rady School are here. UCSD Visitor Parking costs $4.20/hour, up to $33.60/day. However, the number of visitor parking spaces is limited and may require search across multiple parking lots.

4. There is free parking in an unpaved lot at the Torrey Pines Gliderport, a 15-minute walk to the workshop site. However, the lot is popular and may be full.

We thank the scientific committee members. Their volunteer service makes this workshop possible.

Luis Aguiar, University of Zurich
Paulo Albuquerque, INSEAD
Diego Aparicio, IESE Business School
Guy Aridor, Northwestern Kellogg
Shrabastee Banerjee, Tilburg University
Tommaso Bondi, Cornell
Luís Cabral, NYU
Ishita Chakraborty, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Hana Choi, University of Rochester
Junhong Chu, Hong Kong University
Giovanni Compiani, University of Chicago
Dante Donati, Columbia University
Yaniv Dover, The Hebrew University Business School
Jean-Pierre Dube, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Chiara Farronato, Harvard Business School
Jessica Fong, University of Michigan
Andrey Fradkin, Boston University
Pedro Gardete, Nova School of Business and Economics
David Godes, John Hopkins University
Brett Hollenbeck, UCLA Anderson
David Holtz, UC Berkeley
John J. Horton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Justin T. Huang, University of Michigan
Xiang Hui, Washington University in St. Louis
Zhenling Jiang, University of Pennsylvania
Rafael Jimenez-Duran, Bocconi University
Ginger Zhe Jin, University of Maryland
H. Tai Lam, UCLA Anderson
Hannah Li, Columbia University
Jura Liaukonyte, Cornell University
Yi Liu, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Meng Liu, Washington University in St Louis
Fei Long, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Michael Luca, Harvard Business School
Nikhil Malik, University of Southern California
Puneet Manchanda, University of Michigan
Dina Mayzlin, USC Marshall school
Daniel McCarthy, Emory University Goizueta Business School
Carl F. Mela, Duke University
Milan Miric, University of Southern California
Sarah Moshary, UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business
Unnati Narang, UIUC
Sridhar Narayanan, Stanford University
Omid Rafieian, Cornell Tech
Imke Reimers, Cornell University
Michelangelo Rossi, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Navdeep S. Sahni, Stanford University
Amin Sayedi, University of Washington
Stephan Seiler, Imperial College London
Ananya Sen, Carnegie Mellon University
Zijun (June) Shi, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Andrey Simonov, Columbia University
Isamar Troncoso, Harvard Business School
Kosuke Uetake, Yale
Vithala Rao, Cornell University
Caio Waisman, Northwestern University
Joel Waldfogel, University of Minnesota
Yuyan Wang, Stanford University
Nils Wernerfelt, Northwestern
Linli Xu, University of Minnesota
Song Yao, Washington University in St. Louis
Pinar Yildirim, University of Pennsylvania
Hema Yoganarasimhan, University of Washington
Xu Zhang, Xu Zhang
Bo Zhou, University of Maryland
Kai Zhu, Bocconi University
Yi Zhu, University of Minnesota

Friday, April 7, 2023

12:30 : Online Advertising as Passive Search
by Raluca M. Ursu (NYU), Andrey Simonov (Columbia U.), Eunkyung An (NYU).
Discussant: Jura Liaukonyte (Cornell U.)
Replay on YouTube

13:30 : Gratuities in a Digital Services Marketplace
by Seung Hyun Kim (UC San Diego), On Amir (UC San Diego), Kenneth C. Wilbur (UC San Diego).
Discussant: Avner Strulov-Shlain (U. of Chicago)
Replay on YouTube

15:00 : Platform Search Design and Market Power
by H. Tai Lam (UCLA).
Discussant: Giovanni Compiani (U. of Chicago)
Replay on YouTube

16:00 : When to Target Customers? Retention Management using Dynamic Off-Policy Policy Learning
by Ryuya Ko (U. of Tokyo), Kosuke Uetake (Yale U.), Kohei Yata (U. of Wisconsin-Madison), Ryosuke Okada (ZOZO Inc.).
Discussant: Justin Huang (U. of Michigan)
Replay on YouTube

17:00 : Platform Leakage: Incentive Conflicts in Two-Sided Markets
by Yingkang Xie (Northwestern U.), Huaiyu Zhu (Lalamove).
Discussant: Jessica Fong (U. of Michigan)

Saturday, April 8, 2023

09:00 : Does Machine Learning Amplify Pricing Errors in Housing Market?: Economics of ML Feedback Loops
by Nikhil Malik (U. of Southern California), Emaad Manzoor (Cornell U.).
Discussant: Ron Berman (U. of Pennsylvania)
Replay on YouTube

10:00 : "The Effects of Diversity in Algorithmic Recommendations on Digital Content Consumption: A Field Experiment"
by Guangying Chen (Washington U. in St. Louis), Tat Y. Chan (Washington U. in St. Louis), Dennis J. Zhang (Washington U. in St. Louis), Senmao Liu (NetEase Cloud Music Inc.), Yuxiang Wu (NetEase Cloud Music Inc.).
Discussant: David Holtz (UC Berkeley)
Replay on YouTube

11:00 : Advertising as Information for Ranking E-Commerce Search Listings
by Joonhyuk Yang (Notre Dame), Navdeep Sahni (Stanford U.), Harikesh Nair (Google), Xi Xiong (Tiktok).
Discussant: Fei Long (U. of North Carolina)
Replay on YouTube

13:30 : The Impact of Engagement with User-generated Content in Online Discussion Forums
by Varad Deolankar (U. of Michigan), Ali Goli (U. of Washington), S. Sriram (U. of Michigan), Pradeep K. Chintagunta (U. of Chicago).
Discussant: Davide Proserpio (U. of Southern California)
Replay on YouTube

14:30 : The Economics of Content Moderation: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Hate Speech on Twitter
by Rafael Jimenez-Duran (U. of Chicago).
Discussant: Pinar Yildirim (U. of Pennsylvania)
Replay on YouTube

Organizers: Minkyung Kim (CMU), Davide Proserpio (USC), Kenneth C. Wilbur (UCSD)

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