Impact on Individual Consumer Discussed at GAMES Seminar

At the regular GAMES research seminar senior research fellow Aleksey Buzmakov presented his paper “To each according to his needs: selecting an impact with the utmost return for each individual”.

The problem of selecting an optimal impact arises in different areas of research and practice. The most topical is the question how this or that impact influences a certain human, unlike typical or average human. For example, is it necessary to make a discount on a certain good for a certain man?

Aleksey Buzmakov made a review of different methods which allow to answer the question “How some impact affected the economy on the whole, the consumers’ behavior, the companies’ profit?”. These methods fall into two antipodal branches of research: econometrics and data science methods.

The topic of optimal impact is very important in medical industry where “taking a medicine” is an impact and estimation of consequences is whether a medicine has an effect or not. That is why econometric models which allow to answer the question about the influence of some impact are called “Models with treatment effect”. The most topical now is the question: how to predict the consequences of such treatment for an individual? How each human will react on sending an advertisement of a shop on his or her phone – positively (wanting to come once more) or negatively?

Aleksey made preliminary calculations for a typical customer of “Semya” food store (“Semya” retail chain is a partner of GAMES) who has got the chain’s mobile application. It was found that those customers who visited a store less than 5 days ago react negatively on notifications while those who visited a store from 10 to 20 days ago react positively. It is worth saying that on November 7 Aleksey presented his paper to a wider audience as part of the interdisciplinary scientific seminar “Marketing analytics and big data: academic, educational and business agenda”.