2023 Workshop on Platform Analytics

The Workshop on Platform Analytics presents new scientific research on platform analytics: April 7-8, 2023, at the University of California, San Diego.

The Workshop is sponsored by the USC Marshall Initiative on Digital Competition.

Friday, April 7, 2023

11:30 : Box Lunch

12:20 : Welcome

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

13:30 : 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: Hema Yoganarasimhan (U. of Washington)

14:30 : Break

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

16:00 : 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)

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

18:30 : Reception and casual dinner at UCSD Faculty Club, Cecil's Lounge

Saturday, April 8, 2023

08:30 : Coffee

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)

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)

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)

12:00 : Box Lunch

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)

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)

15:30 : Closing

15:40 : Ice Cream

16:00 : Optional short walk to Cliffhanger Cafe at Torrey Pines Gliderport for continued conversations. Part of the walk is unpaved in case that affects footwear.

Register at EventBrite

Registration Fees:
Doctoral Student / Postdoc $99
Faculty $199
Industry $399

Refunds, less Eventbrite fees, are automatically available until March 7.

Travel to San Diego

Things that may not be obvious:

1. Domestic travelers to San Diego airport (code: SAN) may want to search Southwest Airlines as well as regular flight search engines.

2. The John Wayne Airport (code: SNA) in Irvine is a 60-90-minute drive from UCSD.

3. The Tijuana International Airport (code: TIJ) is about a 35-45-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.

4. Those traveling within Southern California may consider the Pacific Surfliner. Train service between Irvine and Oceanside was suspended on Sept. 30 due to erosion in San Clemente but a "bus bridge" operates. This website has more information and updates. You could disembark in Old Town and take the Blue Line to campus.

5. If you fly into LAX or LGB, be advised that public transit options between Los Angeles and San Diego are limited. Consider renting a car.

Accommodation

There is no designated hotel for the workshop. We recommend the following options:

1. The Estancia La Jolla is a lovely boutique hotel within easy walking distance, but expensive. The Lodge at Torrey Pines and La Jolla Beach & Tennis Club are in a similar class but not quite as close. We would recommend booking these properties early.

2. Other convenient hotels within 2-3 miles include Hilton La Jolla Torrey Pines, Residence Inn by Marriott, Sheraton La Jolla, and Hyatt Regency La Jolla At Aventine.

3. San Diego has numerous other accommodation options. We recommend checking Hotels Combined or AirBnB. You may want to consider staying near a Blue Line Trolley stop if you do not rent a car. Or, you could stay in the Village of La Jolla, La Jolla Shores, or University City and rely on ride-sharing services or the MTS 30 bus.

Arriving at UCSD

1. The workshop will be held at the UCSD Rady School of Management. We recommend taxi or ride sharing services like Uber or Lyft as the easiest way to get to the Rady School, because they do not require walking or parking. We recommend this point for drop-off and pick-up.

2. The UC San Diego Trolley Blue Line began operation in 2020 and connects UCSD to Downtown San Diego and the US/Mexico Border. Trolleys run every 15 minutes and fares can be paid on the PRONTO app. We cautiously recommend using the trolley, with two caveats as it may not be the best option for everyone. First, the UCSD Pepper Canyon stop is about a 20-minute walk from the Rady School, including a large hill. Second, the trolley is reliably busy and safe during rush hour, but off-peak ridership is less predictable.
Relatedly, an easy way to travel from SAN airport to UCSD is to take the airport's free Rental Car Shuttle, disembark at Admiral Boland Way, walk one block on Palm Avenue across Pacific Highway, and board the Trolley Blue Line at the Middletown station, as described here.

3. Driving directions to the Rady School are here. UCSD Visitor Parking costs $4/hour, up to a maximum of $32/day. However, the number of visitor parking spaces is limited and may require search across multiple parking lots.

4. There are some free parking spaces in an unpaved lot at the Torrey Pines Gliderport or curbside on nearby Torrey Pines Scenic Dr, a 15-minute walk to the workshop site. The lot usually fills up early on weekday mornings, but more spaces may become available later Friday afternoon or early Saturday.

The 2023 Workshop on Platform Analytics (WoPA) is a single-track, multidisciplinary workshop presenting new research on platform analytics.

Platforms enable direct interactions between diverse groups of agents. Marketplaces connect buyers and sellers; media platforms connect advertisers, creators and viewers; sharing platforms connect resource owners with resource users; app stores connect developers and users. Platforms are pervasive in the digital economy. Sriram et al. (2014) cover some platform research topics in greater depth and point to foundational literature.

We construe Platform Analytics broadly as the use of data to improve decisions in platform contexts. Relevant decisions might include platform design, rankings, listings, usage, pricing, advertising, personalization, ratings or reviews. Relevant topics might include:
-network externalities;
-agent utility, search, matching, purchase or welfare;
-reputation, manipulation, trust or fraud;
-discrimination, diversity or fairness;
-competition within or between platforms;
-data privacy and sharing;
-antitrust or other regulations.
Ideal papers might show how to use platform data to improve decisions in platform contexts.

WoPA will be held in-person in San Diego on April 7, 2023, and last the full day. The organizers are Minkyung Kim (UNC), Davide Proserpio (USC) and Kenneth C. Wilbur (UCSD). The workshop is sponsored by the USC Marshall Initiative on Digital Competition.

We invite working papers on platform analytics for a competitive submission process. We welcome relevant submissions from industry or any academic discipline, including computer science, economics, information systems, marketing, operations or others. Please send full papers to workshoponplatformanalytics@gmail.com by November 1, 2022.

We will notify authors of accepted papers in December. Submitting authors will be invited for priority registration. The program will be posted at PlatformAnalytics.org.

We kindly ask for help distributing this announcement to interested researchers.

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

Ron Berman, Assistant Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Abhishek Borah, Assistant Professor, INSEAD
Jason Choi, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland
Avinash Collis, Assistant Professor, University of Texas at Austin
Giovanni Compiani, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago
Remi Daviet, Assistant Professor, University of Wisconsin
Dante Donati, Assistant Professor, Columbia University
Chiara Farronato, Assistant Professor, Harvard University
Jessica Fong, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Andrey Fradkin, Assistant Professor, Boston University
Soheil Ghili, Assistant Professor, Yale University
Ali Goli, Assistant Professor, University of Washington
Justin Huang, Assistant Professor, University of Michigan
Xiang Hui, Assistant Professor, Washington University in St. Louis
Rafael Jimenez Duran, Assistant Professor, Bocconi University
Mingyu Joo, Assistant Professor, University of California, Riverside
Tesary Lin, Assistant Professor, Boston University
Jia Liu, Assistant Professor, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Nikhil Malik, Assistant Professor, University of Southern California
Emaad Manzoor, Assistant Professor, Cornell University
Milan Miric, Assistant Professor, University of Southern California
Unnati Narang, Assistant Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Zachary Nolan, Assistant Professor, University of Delaware
Omid Rafieian, Assistant Professor, Cornell University
Oren Reshef, Assistant Professor, Washington University in St. Louis
Michelangelo Rossi, Assistant Professor, Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris
Andrey Simonov, Assistant Professor, Columbia University
Ioannis Stamatopoulos, Associate Professor, University of Texas at Austin
Ludovic Stourm, Assistant Professor, HEC Paris
Isamar Troncoso, Assistant Professor, Harvard University
Kosuke Uetake, Associate Professor, Yale University
Prasad Vana, Assistant Professor, Dartmouth University
Yan Xu, Assistant Professor, Virginia Tech University
Joonhyuk Yang, Assistant Professor, University of Notre Dame
Luyi Yang, Assistant Professor, University of California, Berkeley
Xu Zhang, Assistant Professor, London Business School
Clarice Zhao, Assistant Professor, McGill University

European Digital Platform Research Network (EU-DPRN)

Platform Strategy Research Symposium at BU-Questrom

20th ZEW Conference on the Economics of Information and Communication Technologies

Platform Papers Substack

Platformer News

Please email us any other relevant fora we can include here.

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

Workshoponplatformanalytics, followed by the "at" symbol, and then gmail.com