[Mingli Lecture Hall, 2021] 

Time:January 18(Monday)10:00am-11:30 am

Tencent Conference No.: 232 157 851

Reporter: Dr. Tan Yinliang, Administrative Director of Godlin International Education Center, Assistant Professor of Tulane University

Report Content Description:

Digital advertisements offer a full spectrum of behavioral customization for timing and content capabilities. The existing research in display advertising has predominantly concentrated on the content of advertising; however, our focus is on optimizing the timing of display advertising. In practice, users are constantly adjusting their engagement with content as they process new information continuously. The recent development of emotional tracking and wearable technologies allows platforms to monitor the user’s engagement in real time. We model the user’s continuous engagement process through a Brownian motion. The proposed optimal policy regarding the timing of behavioral advertising is based on a threshold policy with a trigger threshold and target level. Specifically, the platform should insert the advertisement when the user’s engagement level reaches the trigger threshold, and the length of the advertisement should let the user’s engagement level drop to the target level. Analogous to the familiar idea of “price discrimination,” the methods we propose in this study allow the platforms to maximize their revenue by “discriminatory” customization of the timing and length of the advertisement based on the behavior of individual users. Finally, we quantify the benefits of the proposed policy by comparing it with the practically prevalent policies (i.e., pre-roll, mid-roll and a mix of the two) through a simulation study. Our results reveal that for a wide range of settings, the proposed policy not only significantly increases the platform’s profitability, but also improves the completion rate at which consumers finish viewing the advertisement.

Reporter profile:

Tan Yinliang is an Assistant Professor of Management Science at the Tulane Freeman School and Executive Director of the Godlin Center for International Education.Dr. Tan Yinliang graduated from the University of Florida, studying operational management and information systems.He has extensive teaching experience in business analysis and has won the Freeman Best Teacher Award for Business School.His research interests are mainly focused on technology management and innovation, electronics pricing, and artificial intelligence.He has published several papers in Management Science,MIS Quarterly,Information Systems Research,Production and Operations Management, the top international journal Management Science,MIS Quarterly,Information Systems Research,Production and Operations Management.Now as senior editor of Production and Operations Management as well as associate editor of Decision Science.He was named the World's Best 40 Business School Professor under 40 in 2019 and the first professor in the history of Tulane University to receive this distinction.

(Organized by: Department of Management Engineering, Scientific Research and Academic Exchange Center)