Category: genres

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Google Inc. (teaching materials) with Thomas Eisenmann

Edelman, Benjamin, and Thomas R. Eisenmann. “Google Inc.” Harvard Business School Case 910-036, January 2010. (Revised April 2011.) (Winner of ECCH 2011 Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Case Method – Strategy and General Management.) (educator access at HBP.)

Describes Google’s history, business model, governance structure, corporate culture, and processes for managing innovation. Reviews Google’s recent strategic initiatives and the threats they pose to Yahoo, Microsoft, and others. Asks what Google should do next. One option is to stay focused on the company’s core competence, i.e., developing superior search solutions and monetizing them through targeted advertising. Another option is to branch into new arenas, for example, build Google into a portal like Yahoo or MSN; extend Google’s role in e-commerce beyond search, to encompass a more active role as an intermediary (like eBay) facilitating transactions; or challenge Microsoft’s position on the PC desktop by developing software to compete with Office and Windows.

Supplements:

Google Inc. (Abridged) – Case (HBP 910032)

Teaching Materials:

Google inc. and Google Inc. (Abridged) – Teaching Note (HBP 910050)

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Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting

Moore, Tyler, and Benjamin Edelman. “Measuring the Perpetrators and Funders of Typosquatting.” Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer-Verlag. Financial Cryptography and Data Security: Proceedings of the International Conference 6052 (2010). (Introduction, Web appendix.)

We describe a method for identifying “typosquatting”, the intentional registration of misspellings of popular website addresses. We estimate that at least 938,000 typosquatting domains target the top 3,264 .com sites, and we crawl more than 285,000 of these domains to analyze their revenue sources. We find that 80% are supported by pay-per-click ads, often advertising the correctly spelled domain and its competitors. Another 20% include static redirection to other sites. We present an automated technique that uncovered 75 otherwise legitimate websites which benefited from direct links from thousands of misspellings of competing websites. Using regression analysis, we find that websites in categories with higher pay-per-click ad prices face more typosquatting registrations, indicating that ad platforms such as Google AdWords exacerbate typosquatting. However, our investigations also confirm the feasibility of significantly reducing typosquatting. We find that typosquatting is highly concentrated: of typo domains showing Google ads, 63% use one of five advertising IDs, and some large name servers host typosquatting domains as much as four times as often as the web as a whole.

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Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?

Edelman, Benjamin. “Red Light States: Who Buys Online Adult Entertainment?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 209-220.

This paper studies the adult online entertainment industry, particularly the consumption side of the market. In particular, it focuses on the demographics and consumption patterns of those who subscribe to adult entertainment websites. On the surface, this business would seem to face a number of obstacles. Regulatory and legal barriers have already been mentioned. In addition, those charging for access to adult entertainment face competition from similar content available without a fee. In the context of adult entertainment, free access offers consumers an extra benefit: online payments tend to create records documenting the fact of a customer’s purchase; consumers of free content may feel more confident that their purchases will remain confidential. More broadly, measured levels of religiosity in America are high. On the other hand, social critics often argue that the rise of Internet pornography is contributing to a coarsening of American culture. Do consumption patterns of online adult entertainment reveal two separate Americas? Or is the consumption of online adult entertainment widespread, regardless of legal barriers, potential for embarrassment, and even religious conviction?

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Who Owns Metrics?: Building a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers

Edelman, Benjamin. “Who Owns Metrics?: Building a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers.” Journal of Advertising Research 49, no. 4 (December 2009). (Adapted from Towards a Bill of Rights for Online Advertisers.)

I offer five rights to protect advertisers from increasingly powerful ad networks-avoiding fraudulent charges for services not rendered, guaranteeing data portability so advertisers get the best possible value, and assuring price transparency so advertisers know what they’re buying. I explain the need for these rights by presenting specific practices causing particular concern.

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Personal Rapid Transport at Vectus, Ltd. (teaching materials)

Edelman, Benjamin. “Personal Rapid Transport at Vectus, Ltd.” Harvard Business School Case 910-010, November 2009. (Revised September 2010.) (Featured in Working Knowledge: Can Entrepreneurs Drive People Movers to Success?) (educator access at HBP. courtesy copy.)

Personal Rapid Transport (PRT) vehicles—often called “driverless taxis”—sought to combine the best characteristics of cars, taxis, and trains, while adding features unavailable in any existing transportation system. Like cars and taxis, PRT vehicles carried small groups—often just a single passenger—with no need to wait for a shared vehicle to arrive or for others to board. Yet PRT followed train systems in using an exclusive right of way that avoided delays from other traffic. Where would such systems be most useful? Could system designers successfully compete with well-established networks of trains, buses, cars, and roads?

Teaching Materials:

Personal Rapid Transport at Vectus, Ltd. – Teaching Note (HBP 910024)

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The Dark Underbelly of Online Advertising

Edelman, Benjamin. “The Dark Underbelly of Online Advertising.” HBR Now. (November 17, 2009).

The Internet is sold to advertisers as a highly measurable medium that is the most efficient way to target exactly the right customers. But online advertising is also easily subverted–letting fraudsters claim advertising fees for work they did not actually do. The trickiest frauds deceive advertisers so effectively that measurements of ad effectiveness report the fraudsters as exceptionally productive and high quality, rather than revealing that their traffic was actually worthless. This is a quiet scandal. In a time of tightening ad budgets, losses to advertising fraud come straight from the bottom line–but savings can be equally dramatic. Here’s a look behind the veil–an explanation of ad practices that have cheated even the Web’s largest advertisers. Advertising scams take plenty of victims, both witting and not, but I offer strategies to help determined marketers protect themselves.

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Deception in Post-Transaction Marketing Offers

Edelman, Benjamin. “Deception in Post-Transaction Marketing Offers.” U.S. Senate, Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, November 2009.

I examine the consumer protection issues raised by post-transaction marketing offers. My key concerns:

  • Post‐transaction marketing offers systematically reach consumers in a time when consumers are particularly vulnerable. Post‐transaction offers feature deceptive designs that invite consumers to conclude, mistakenly, that the offers comes from the companies the consumers have chosen to frequent, and that the offers are a required part of the checkout process.
  • The automatic transfer of consumers’ payment information from a merchant to a post ‐ transaction marketer runs contrary to consumer expectations, and creates a heightened risk that consumers will “accept” financial obligations they did not intend to incur.
  • Disclosures fail to cure the deception created by post-transaction offers, their timing and formatting, and their automatic transfer of consumers’ payment information.
  • Straightforward remedies could protect consumers who have suffered unwanted charges, and could prevent further consumers from incurring similar charges.
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eBay Partner Network (teaching materials) with Ian Larkin

Edelman, Benjamin, and Ian Larkin. “eBay Partner Network (A).” Harvard Business School Case 910-008, September 2009. (Revised March 2015.) (educator access at HBP. request a courtesy copy.)

eBay considers adjustments to the structure and rules of its affiliate marketing program, eBay Partner Network (ePN). In particular, eBay reevaluates affiliate compensation structure, the role of bonuses for especially productive affiliates, and the overall rationale for outsourcing online marketing efforts to independent affiliates. The case presents the history and development of ePN, ePN’s importance to eBay, and the mechanics of online affiliate marketing.

Supplements:

eBay Partner Network (B) – Supplement (HBP 910009)

eBay Partner Network (C) – Supplement (HBP 910012)

eBay Partner Network (D) – Supplement (HBP 914016)

Teaching Materials:

eBay Partner Network (A), (B), (C), and (D) – Teaching Note (HBP 910025)

eBay Partner Network – slide supplement (HBP 911039)

eBay Partner Network – slide supplement (widescreen) (HBP 914040)

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Deterring Online Advertising Fraud Through Optimal Payment in Arrears

Edelman, Benjamin. “Deterring Online Advertising Fraud Through Optimal Payment in Arrears.” Financial Cryptography and Data Security: Proceedings of the International Conference (September 2009). (Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science.) (Featured in Working Knowledge: Reducing Risk with Online Advertising.)

Online advertisers face substantial difficulty in selecting and supervising small advertising partners. Fraud can be well hidden, and limited reputation systems reduce accountability. But partners are not paid until after their work is complete, and advertisers can extend this delay both to improve detection of improper partner practices and to punish partners who turn out to be rule-breakers. I capture these relationships in a screening model with delayed payments and probabilistic delayed observation of agents’ types. I derive conditions in which an advertising principal can set its payment delay to deter rogue agents and to attract solely or primarily good-type agents. Through the savings from excluding rogue agents, the principal can increase its profits while offering increased payments to good-type agents. I estimate that a leading affiliate network could have invoked an optimal payment delay to eliminate 71% of fraud without decreasing profit.