2026-09-18T18:39:01Zhttps://dspace.mit.edu/server/oai/requestoai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/1307352024-10-17T17:35:18Zcom_1721.1_7582com_1721.1_7581col_1721.1_131023
Sinan Aral.
Cao, Yiqun(Scientist in business management)Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Sloan School of Management.
Sloan School of Management
2021-05-24T19:53:23Z
2021-05-24T19:53:23Z
2021
2021
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/130735
1251804617
Thesis: S.M. in Management Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, February, 2021
Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 41-42).
There has been a lot of discussions on giving user more control over their private information. Our paper wants to show how practices that give user more control over privacy, could facilitate collection of self-stated interest from voluntary users. This might potentially help firms to better understand users' true interests. The paper investigates the short run and long run impact of adopting the user stated interest into ad targeting, compared with targeting using firm inferred user interest. It also explores the side effects on user's overall app engagement and the possible mechanisms that associate users' action of stating interest with impact on their interest in ads and organic contents. Results show that on average users get more interested in ads immediately after the ad targeting adopts user stated interest categories. In the long run, however, not only does the effect diminish quickly, but there is also a lasting and significantly negative effect on users' overall app engagement, possibly because both organic content and ad targeting use the same user profile.
by Yiqun Cao.
S.M. in Management Research
S.M. in Management Research Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management
42 pages
eng
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
Sloan School of Management.
Comparing user behavior when targeted based on firm inferred interest vs. user stated interest
Thesis
application/pdf
2021-05-25T17:07:45Z
Publication
unknown
unknown
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<Abstract>There has been a lot of discussions on giving user more control over their private information. Our paper wants to show how practices that give user more control over privacy, could facilitate collection of self-stated interest from voluntary users. This might potentially help firms to better understand users' true interests. The paper investigates the short run and long run impact of adopting the user stated interest into ad targeting, compared with targeting using firm inferred user interest. It also explores the side effects on user's overall app engagement and the possible mechanisms that associate users' action of stating interest with impact on their interest in ads and organic contents. Results show that on average users get more interested in ads immediately after the ad targeting adopts user stated interest categories. In the long run, however, not only does the effect diminish quickly, but there is also a lasting and significantly negative effect on users' overall app engagement, possibly because both organic content and ad targeting use the same user profile.</Abstract>
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