 Behind the clicks: Can Amazon allocate user attention as it pleases?Rufus Rock, Ilan Strauss, Tim O'Reilly and Mariana Mazzucato Information Economics and Policy, 2024, vol. 69, issue C Abstract: We investigate Amazon's ability to direct user clicks to more visually prominent search results, even as quality declines with the increasing prevalence of sponsored advertising products. We analyze product results from over 2,000 Amazon Marketplace search queries to estimate how a top three most clicked product's features (price and quality) and screen placement influence a user's clicks. Our econometric results show that the position of a product search result (“position bias”), adjusted for its relative prominence on the screen, strongly shapes whether a user clicks on it. Within the top five search results, where typically four are advertisements, users exhibit decreased sensitivity to a product's relevance or pricing. This allows Amazon's sponsored ads to leverage product prominence as a mechanism for rent extraction from users and producers. Regulatory frameworks might limit platforms from exploiting consumers' satisficing behaviour online, including via moderating excessive advertising in algorithmic search results. Keywords: Attention markets; Amazon; Bounded rationality; Decision science; Digital advertising (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:iepoli:v:69:y:2024:i:c:s0167624524000374 DOI: 10.1016/j.infoecopol.2024.101115 Access Statistics for this article Information Economics and Policy is currently edited by D. Waterman More articles in Information Economics and Policy from Elsevier |
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