Prof. Dr. Bernd Skiera receives ERC-Advanced Investigator Grant from the European Research Council

Investigating the economic dimesions of cookies

Cookies enable companies to collect information about users on the Internet. This information is also used to increase the revenue from online advertising that websites need in order to continue to be usable free of charge. However, collecting information restricts the privacy of users. The EU therefore limits the use of cookies (e.g. via the Basic Data Protection Regulation (DSGVO) or the planned ePrivacy Regulation).

So far, there is very little empirical knowledge about the value of cookies for advertisers. It is therefore difficult for politicians to weigh up whether the restrictions on cookies in the interest of privacy are not accompanied by high losses for companies whose promotion is also a political objective. The research project COOKIES (Economic Consequences of Restrictions on the Usage of Cookies) by Prof. Bernd Skiera aims to close this knowledge gap.

Several data sets will be analysed, including a cookie data set containing prices for online advertising of more than 2.8 billion (anonymous) cookies and an implementation data set showing how thousands of websites have implemented the basic EU data protection regulation that came into force in 2018. The funding amounts to almost 2 million euros. Bernd Skiera has held the chair of Electronic Commerce at Goethe University since 1999. In its most recent ranking (2014), the Handelsblatt named him the most research-intensive business administration professor in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. 13 of his former doctoral students are now professors in Germany, Austria, the USA, England and Spain, nine of them in lifetime positions.

We congratulate Prof. Dr. Bernd Skiera on this remarkable success.

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