CAS CS 591/791 - Fall 2012 - Electronic Commerce

Course Overview: In spite of the Internet economy's rapid growth over the past two decades, to roughly 10% of GDP worldwide (with the US significantly lagging both developed and developing economies), the world of electronic commerce has received relatively little attention in academia. It is true that economists and management scientists have studied the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful Internet firms, and that game theorists and computer scientists have helped pioneer foundations such as the theory of second-price auctions, and systems innovation, such as the realization of the massive two-sided markets driven by search engine advertising and ad networks. However, only recently have experimentalists deeply tapped into the opportunity that unlike traditional markets, many aspects of the electronic commerce marketplace are not only publicly observable, but are readily available for online measurement and data collection. Therefore, research on questions such as the prevalence of "sniping" on eBay, the effectiveness of Groupon personalizing its daily deals for subscribers, or the study of how landlords learn how to price inventory on AirBnB, can all be evaluated via large-scale measurements, enabling studies that were not previously possible.

In this class, we will consider electronic commerce from a broad and inter-disciplinary perspective, reading seminal papers on theoretical foundations and empirical findings written by the Computer Science, Information Systems, Marketing, and Economics communities; we plan to attract course participants and guest lecturers from these various disciplines. Our goal, however, will then be to focus on quantitative evaluation of the e-commerce marketplace, and to enable students to conduct research in this area. A core competency that we will develop is fluency with big data: experimental methods; best practices and techniques for data collection, data mining, and statistical analysis; effective presentation of findings; as well as the ethics of data collection. The capstone project of the course will be an individual or team research project in which students conduct a quantitative measurement-driven analysis of a computational aspect of an e-commerce firm or of consumer behavior with respect to an e-commerce marketplace.

Prerequisites: This course is designed for students who are potentially interested in pursuing graduate research related to Electronic Commerce. Please note that this course is not about entrepreneurship. While students' backgrounds will vary, it is expected that students have completed an undergraduate major in an area related to the course topics (such as CS, Economics, or Marketing). Seniors who have completed all required coursework except for electives should seek the instructor's permission to enroll.

Instructor:  Prof. John W. Byers

Instructor Bio:

Class meeting time:   Tues/Thurs 3:30-5:00,   MCS 180 (Hariri Institute Conference Room).

Course Syllabus.

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