第636期岭南学术论坛（经济学系列Seminar）

报 告 题 目：How Recommendation Affects Customer Search: A Field Experiment

报   告   人：袁哲（浙江大学经济学院 百人计划研究员）

主   持   人：郝彤彤（中山大学岭南学院 助理教授）

时         间： 2023年3月3日（周五）下午14:30

地         点： 岭南堂汪道涵会议室

语         言： 中文+英文

讲座介绍：

Product recommendation and search are two technology-mediated channels through which E-commerce platforms can help customers find products: Customers are passive in the former and proactive in the latter. However, the relationship between the two channels, and the underlying mechanisms and implications for platform design are not well understood. We use a randomized field experiment with 555,800 customers on a large E-commerce platform to investigate how product recommendation affects customer search. We vary the quality of the recommendation that users experience upon arriving at the homepage of the platform and find that a decrease in the recommendation relevance leads to a significant increase in the consumer’s use of search channel, indicating a (partial) substitution effect between the two at the aggregate level. We propose a conceptual framework and theorize how different states of customer demand—demand fulfillment and demand formation—may drive such a relationship. We further exploit the rich heterogeneity across user groups and product categories and use computational linguistic methods to examine customers’ search queries in detail. The results are aligned with our framework and provide evidence that both demand formation and demand fulfillment are at work in the channel interactions between recommendation and search: demand formation is associated with channel complementarity and demand fulfillment is associated with channel substitution. Specifically, when customers receive more product recommendation in a category, they search more in that category and search with generic query words, which indicates a complementarity between recommendation and search. But when customers receive less product recommendation in a category that they are interested in, they compensate for this reduction by searching more in that category and search with long-tail query words, which indicates a substitution between recommendation and search. However, we do not find substitution or complementarity when customers receive less product recommendation in categories that they are not interested in. This experimental study is among the first to examine the causal relationship between the recommendation channel and search channel and offers implications on the design of E-commerce platforms.

报告人简介：

        袁哲，浙江大学经济学院百人计划研究员，多伦多大学博士，北京大学本科。袁哲的专业方向是产业经济学和数字经济，主要兴趣包括网络经济（航空网络和电信网络），数字经济与平台经济（大数据、搜索机制、机制设计），和数据价值与数据隐私。他的论文发表（或即将发表）于AEJ-micro, Management Science等国际顶尖刊物刊物。他主持国家青年自科项目，参与多项国家自科重大和重大专项项目。袁哲博士最近聚焦于研究数据价值和信息披露对消费者、商家和市场结构的影响；平台机制设计；算法与人的关系。他用实验和结构模型的方法来回答关于网络经济的问题，并且与阿里巴巴集团合作推进经济分析和实验。

       欢迎感兴趣的师生参加！

       中山大学岭南学术论坛分经济学和金融学两大系列，是定期邀请国内外优秀学者前来开展学术交流的平台。每系列每个月定期举办2-3次。目前已经成功举办多期，并得到了各界的高度评价。