Research Interests
Since taking over the chair of Electronic Commerce in 1999, my research has dealt with various issues in the digital world.
My research is not limited to "electronic commerce" but also analyzes, among other things, appropriate privacy on the Internet (e.g., in the context of my ERC Advanced Research Grant), the identification and visualization of market structures (e.g., via the tool evomap), the valuation of Internet companies, or "programmatic advertising," i.e., the data-driven, automated, and individualized purchase of advertisements on the Internet (e.g., via so-called ad exchanges).
At Marini Systems, a company I co-founded more than ten years ago, we develop software for "Intelligent Data Integration" and thus for technologies such as "EiPaas" (Enterprise Integration Platform-as-a-Service) or "Robotic Selling," i.e., the completely software-supported initiation of sales calls for sales staff in B2B companies.
In my research, I primarily develop models that identify economic impacts, mainly for companies, but recently also for consumers. I work almost exclusively empirically and often with corporate practitioners. "Big Data" has always been of enormous importance to me. So my chair itself runs several servers for analyzing extensive data sets, typically in R (for econometric analyses) or Python (when using "machine learning" techniques). In this respect, it is also consistent that I offer a lot of teaching in the area of "marketing analytics."
I always start my research projects by asking what the problem is. Then I consider why solving the problem is essential and whether I have skills that enable me to solve it better than many others. I find questions that address new issues particularly interesting. Most recently, for example, we looked at whether there is fair competition on the Amazon Market Place (representative of many other platforms on the Internet).