Abstract:

Cookies enable companies to collect and exchange extensive information about users. This information is often used to improve the performance of online advertising. Yet, the collection of information leads to a loss of privacy. Accordingly, EU policy makers have put forward initiatives to restrict cookie usage. So far, there exists very little empirical knowledge on the trade-off between user privacy and the economic value that website publishers, advertisers, and even users derive from cookies. As a result, policy makers have no way of telling whether their restrictions on cookies have the intended positive consequences for user privacy, or whether any benefits are outweighed by negative effects on the profits of companies. To begin to fill this gap on the cost side of this discourse, we estimate the potential upper-bound of an economic loss for digital publishers of lifespan restrictions on cookies. Our analysis is based on an empirical study on cookies of 54,127 users who received about 130 million ad impressions over almost 2.5 years. Restricting their lifetime to one year as the European Union proposes decreases their cookie lifetime value by 14.1%. In light of the €10.6 Bn. cookie-based display ad revenue in Europe, such restrictions would endanger each year €180 Mio.

Zur Person:

Professor Dr. Bernd Skiera hat seit 1999 den damals ersten Lehrstuhl für Electronic Commerce in Deutschland an der Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main inne. 2018 hat er den Long-Term Impact Award des Journal of Marketing erhalten. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Electronic Commerce, Online-Marketing, Marketing Analytics, Privatsphäre von Konsumenten im Internet sowie Kundenwertmanagement. Aufgrund seiner beruflichen Erfahrungen, u.a. als Software-Entwickler bei SAP und als Gesellschafter von Marini Systems (www.marini.de), interessieren ihn ganz besonders Fragestellungen an der Schnittstelle zwischen Wirtschaftsinformatik und Marketing.