In April, MSI announced winners and honorable mention recipients in the 2022 Alden G. Clayton Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Competition:

WINNER  

Malika Korganbekova, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University  

Advisor: Brett Gordon, Eric Anderson, and Caio Waisman
Balancing Privacy and Personalization  

HONORABLE MENTIONS  

Mohsen Foroughifar, University of Toronto 
Advisor: Nitin Mehta and David Soberman
The Challenges of Deploying an Algorithmic Pricing Tool: Evidence from Airbnb  

Maren Hoff, Columbia University 
Advisor: Silvia Bellezza 
Understanding Product Trends  

Jong Yeob Kim, NYU Stern 
Advisor: Masakazu Ishihara and Vishal Singh 
Health Insurance and the Dynamics of Patient Decision Making  

“This year our winner is Malika Korganbekova, who is completing her PhD at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Malika’s advisors are Brett Gordon, Eric Anderson, and Caio Waisman,” said MSI Executive Director John Lynch.

“Current privacy restrictions imposed by browsers such as Safari, Chrome, Firefox distort the quality of the individual-level data that online platforms use to personalize user experience. Malika collaborates with Wayfair, a large US-based online retailer of furniture and home goods, to investigate the consequences of these privacy restrictions on consumer, seller, and platform outcomes. Using large-scale randomized experiments, the paper shows that in the absence of privacy restrictions, personalization leads to better consumer-product matches, resulting in an estimated 10% lower product returns and significant consumer welfare increase. However, in the presence of privacy restrictions, platform uses distorted signals of consumer preferences for personalization which leads to substantial welfare losses. Using data from big ticket product categories, the paper shows that to justify these losses, consumers should have valued their privacy at 10-15% of the product’s price (approximately, $40-50). The paper subsequently shows that following Google’s Privacy Sandbox solutions of segmenting consumers based on interests can mitigate some of the losses. MSI is proud to share the research findings of our honorees with the business community and support these young scholars.”

As a winner, Malika Korganbekova will receive $3,000. In addition, winners and honorable mentions are invited to attend the MSI 2023 Analytics Conference, where their work will be acknowledged.