The Role of Digital Platforms in Data Markets: How Data Sharing Through Advanced Analytics Empowers Small Business Innovation

About the seminar topic

Despite the promising value of data in digital markets, data sharing across firms is hindered due to increasingly stringent data regulations. Leveraging their remarkable data aggregation and analytical capabilities, digital platforms can play an essential role in empowering firms, particularly small businesses, by sharing market data through sophisticated data analytics.

In collaboration with one of the world’s leading digital platforms, Alibaba’s Taobao Marketplace, we study how freely sharing advanced analytics by Taobao with its marketplace retailers affects their sales performance. Employing a quasi-experimental design with a synthetic difference-in-differences approach, we find:

• advanced analytics can lead to a 30% increase in retailers’ sales revenue, as an addition to basic descriptive analytics
• within advanced analytics, firm-level data analytics, combined with market-level data analytics that analyse aggregated market-level data of the platform, contribute more substantially to sales growth than analytics with individual retailer’s on domain data and show an increasing return in the long run
• small retailers derive more significant benefits than large retailers, with the additional improvement primarily driven by combining firm and market-level data analytics
• the mechanism analysis shows that the observed positive impacts of advanced analytics are mainly attributed to product assortment innovation. Adopted retailers tend to release more new products and are more inclined to expand into new categories

Our findings contribute to the emerging global debate on data regulation and digital platforms, providing novel managerial and policy insights for digital platforms in efficiently utilising non-rival market data to empower small businesses.

Speaker bio

Chen Yubo is Coca-Cola Chair Professor of Marketing and Director of the Center for Internet Development and Governance at the School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University. He received his PhD in Marketing from the University of Florida. Before joining Tsinghua, he was a tenured professor at Eller College of Management, University of Arizona, USA.

His main research areas include digital economy, digital platform and sustainability strategy. He has published extensively in top journals such as:

• Journal of Marketing
• Journal of Marketing Research
• Marketing Science
• Information Systems Research
• Management Science

His research has won many international awards and recognitions, including:

• INFORMS Frank M. Bass Best Paper Finalist Award
• Journal of Marketing MSI/Paul H. Root Award Finalist
• Journal of Marketing Research William F. O’Dell Long-term Impact Award Finalist

He was listed in Stanford/Elsevier World Top 2% Scientists List in 2022.

Register

No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.