Behind the Clicks: Can Amazon allocate user attention as it pleases?
Citation:
Work data:
ISSN: 2635-0122
Type of work: Working Paper
Categories:
e-Business & e-Commerce | Economics | ICT Infrastructure | Information SocietyAbstract:
We investigate Amazon’s power to extract economic rents through the algorithmic arrangement of search results. We analyze 2023 Amazon Marketplace search result data, focusing on product features and the top-3 most clicked products, to estimate what drives user clicks. Our econometric results show that increased visual prominence and positioning (“attention share”) correlates strongly with more clicks, even when products have a higher price or worse ratings. Among the top five search results, where typically four are advertisements, we find that neither decreased relevancy nor increased price significantly sways user decisions. This suggests that users tend to satisfice, accepting the products displayed prominently by Amazon’s algorithms, rather than exhaustively searching for optimal choices. Advertising on Amazon exploits this behavioural dynamic by transforming product prominence into a mechanism for rent-extraction.
Downloads:
Rock, R., Strauss, I., O'Reilly, T. & Mazzucato, M. (2023). Behind the Clicks: Can Amazon allocate user attention as it pleases?. UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose, Working Paper Series (IIPP WP 2023-11). London: UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.
