Gina Markov Publications

The more information a monopolist seller has about consumer preferences, the more power it has to price selectively and maximize profits. This paper analyzes the welfare consequences of price discrimination via market segmentation. The authors use formal mathematical arguments to show that a market can be segmented to produce all feasible surplus combinations. They conclude that consumer welfare can be prioritized through the proper structuring of information transmission and data collection.

For search engine giants like Google, advertising is their primary source of profits. This paper explores what happens to these profits when advertisers let intermediary companies bid in ad auctions on their behalf. The authors discuss strategies that intermediaries employ to distort and coordinate bids. Using a novel market definition and approach to analyzing intermediary concentration, the authors show that intermediaries may be powerful countervailing forces against Google’s market dominance.

Firms are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to analyze marketplace trends and determine pricing strategies. This paper demonstrates how AI pricing algorithms may actually learn, with no human instruction, to set anti-competitive prices under standard economic conditions. The authors’ findings highlight the need for antitrust reform that recognizes the potential for algorithms to autonomously collude.

This paper explores the relationship between two ubiquitous phenomena in the digital economy: online ad auctions and tracking cookies. The authors assess what happens to ad auction revenue when competing advertisers receive different kinds of information from their cookies. They find that the revenue to ad sellers like Google and Facebook changes dramatically based on ad auction structure and on the quantity and quality of information available to advertisers.

A revolutionary approach to data ownership and privacy, Solid is a tech stack developed by the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. Solid’s mission is to decentralize the web by doing away with huge data silos, providing users ownership over their personal data, and reshaping the nature of competition among digital companies.