2008 Headlines
Research by Young-Hoon Park Among Year's Best
Associate professor's work nominated for top marketing research honor
July 2, 2008 | Ithaca, NY | Research by Young-Hoon Park, associate professor of marketing at the Johnson School, was selected a finalist for the John D.C. Little Award, the highest research honor of the Society for Marketing Science. The award goes to the best marketing paper published Marketing Science or Management Science in the previous year.
Park and co-author Eric T. Bradlow were recognized for their paper titled, " Bayesian Estimation of Bid Sequences in Internet Auctions using a Generalized Record Breaking Model." The paper was published in the March-April 2007 issue of Marketing Science.
Park and Bradlow drew an analogy between bids in an internet auction and record-breaking events in sports or meteorology, and created a modeling framework to analyze record-breaking events in online auctions, defined as a current bid that has broken the record of the last bid. In classic record-breaking data sets, the number of competitions and failed attempts to break the record are observed. In internet auction data, however, one can only see the bid of the leading bidder, but not the participation of all of those people who are in the game.
The researchers use data augmentation and assume that auction participants have dynamically changing valuations for the auctioned item. Yet the latent number of bidders competing in those events is unseen. Thus, Park and Bradlow formulated a generalized record-breaking problem as a missing data problem.
The researchers analyzed data on notebook computer auctions from one of the largest Internet auction sites in Korea, whose auction format is the same as that used by Yahoo!Auctions. By applying their model, Park and Bradlow found significant variation in the number of latent bidders across auctions. Moreover, bidders are significant in number relative to observed bidders, and the latent number of remaining bidders is considerably smaller than that of new entrants to the auction, after a given bid. Another important finding is that larger bid and time increments significantly influence the bidding participation behavior of the remaining bidders. The model also allowed them to apply brand maps to the auction data to measure brand equity in the online auction context. In other words, the researchers were able to extrapolate the equity of the brands being sold from bidding behavior.
Park joined the Johnson School faculty as acting assistant professor in 2001. After completing his PhD in marketing at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, in 2002, he was named assistant professor of marketing. In May 2008, graduating MBA students recognized him with the school's top teaching award. The following month, he was promoted to associate professor.
