Research

Working Papers (manuscript available upon request)

[1] “Beyond Zero-Sum: The Unexpected Dividend from Competitors Targeting your Customers” with Arnaud De Bruyn, and PK Kannan (Job Market Paper—under review at Marketing Science)

Abstract: Recent trends in the digital economy (such as data brokers and data sharing) have intensified competitive targeting of customers, yet the impact of this competitive targeting on individual customer behavior remains poorly understood. Specifically, when competitors target customers, does this cause budget reallocation or expand total spending? Our study addresses this question within the context of the nonprofit sector by leveraging a proprietary data set from a data broker that tracks individual-level solicitations and donations for 35 charities over an eight-year period. Our observation period features the staggered entry of multiple competitors, enabling causal estimation of new competitors' solicitation effects on incumbent charity donations. To address selection bias and overcome traditional matching limitations, we introduce a novel methodology utilizing transformer-based embeddings to construct treatment and control groups. Our results show that competitive solicitations generate positive spillovers, increasing donations to incumbents rather than cannibalizing them. These positive spillovers are strongest among donors with a history of making frequent donations and supporting a broader portfolio of charities. This study provides the first evidence of competitive targeting effects in markets characterized by intangible rather than physical switching costs and introduces a novel deep learning-based matching methodology for causal inference in non-experimental settings.

[2] “Read the Room: Delivering the Right Message at the Right Time ” with Arnaud De Bruyn, Sumon Chaudhuri, Marc Mazodier, and Raoul Kubler (Targeted at JM)

Abstract: In today's cluttered digital landscape, achieving campaign engagement is a constant challenge for organizations. While alignment between organizational messaging and ongoing public conversations is widely acknowledged as a key driver of communication effectiveness, there remains a lack of systematic understanding of how this phenomenon works or how managers can capitalize on it. We address this gap and investigate the role of topic salience—the salience of a topic in public conversations—in shaping engagement. Through empirical analysis of two distinct contexts—U.S. political tweets during a presidential election and Greenpeace's email campaigns—we uncover an inverted U-shaped relationship between topic salience and engagement. This nonlinear effect indicates that while aligning with salient topics improves engagement, topic saturation leads to audience fatigue. This relationship is further moderated by public sentiment, with negative sentiment accelerating the onset of fatigue. Our simulation indicates that a simple managerial heuristic to better time campaigns within a ± 1 week window can already improve engagement by up to 9.2%.

Research in Progress

[3] “Who gains from Inter-Organizational Data Exchange? An Ablation Study of Competitive Spillovers in the Charitable Sector” with Arnaud De Bruyn and Sumon Chaudhuri (final data analysis in progress)

[4] “Electoral Fatigue: Psychological response to Electoral Media Overexposure” with Raoul Kubler, Arnaud De Bruyn, and Kai Manke (analysis completed (first draft under development)

[5] “Catalyzing Conversations and Conversions: The Spillover of Sponsored WOM to Organic WOM and Its Impact on Focal and Competitor Sales” with Marc Mazodier and Aman Soni (data analysis in progress)

[6] “Speaking Customer Language: Graph RAG for Market-Oriented Communications” with Thomas Reutterer (model developed-awaiting data collection)