Lukas Jürgensmeier wins ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Award

In his dissertation, Lukas Jürgensmeier proposes how to measure whether competition is fair, especially on digital platforms such as Amazon. For this work, the Informs Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) awarded Lukas Jürgensmeier the 2023 ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Award at this year’s Marketing Science Conference in Miami, Florida. The award comes with US$ 5,000 prize money and is considered one of the most prestigious awards for doctoral students in Quantitative Marketing.

Bernd Skiera advises the dissertation of Lukas Jürgensmeier, a doctoral student at Goethe University’s Marketing department since 2021. Their joint research, part of the recognized dissertation proposal, develops a procedure to test for unfair competition through recommendations on digital platforms. The article, referenced below, applies this procedure to the Amazon Marketplace and estimates whether Amazon engages in “self-preferencing”—unfairly ranking Amazon’s own products higher than competing products.
Since 2010, ISMS has awarded the ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Award annually “to recognize the best doctoral dissertation proposals on important topics in marketing science.” In addition to Lukas Jürgensmeier from Goethe University Frankfurt, the 2023 winners include Mohsen Foroughifar (University of Toronto), George Gui, Rupali Kaul (both Stanford University), and Ankit Sisodia (Yale University). This year’s award for a Ph.D. student of Goethe University is only the fourth time (of almost 50 awards) that a Ph.D. student from outside North America won this award.

Read the current working paper here: Jürgensmeier, Lukas and Skiera, Bernd (2023): “Measuring Fair Competition on Digital Platforms.” Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4393726.

Read more about the ISMS Doctoral Dissertation Award here: https://connect.informs.org/isms/awards/isms-doctoral-awards.