On February 8th, the Bay Area Tech Economics Seminar Series will feature Kenneth C. Wilbur, Professor of Marketing and Analytics at the University of California, San Diego.

Presentation title: Is Generative AI Disrupting the Digital Economy? Early Evidence from Card Spending Data Suggests Not

Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence raises concerns about human jobs, but what about other products and services? If customers “hire” products to “do jobs,” is generative AI threatening the services that perform those jobs? We investigate a large card spending panel to understand how early ChatGPT-4 adopters changed their spending on other digital services. We use later cohorts of ChatGPT-4 adopters to predict early adopters’ counterfactual spending and apply a triple-difference identification strategy with Coarsened Exact Matching. We find that ChatGPT-4 adoption increased consumer spending on other AI products. Our estimates rule out market share changes of 1% for the large majority of brands, with a few exceptions. We will present more results during the talk.

About Kenneth Wilbur: Kenneth Wilbur serves as a Professor of Marketing and Analytics, and the Sheryl and Harvey White Chair in Management at the University of California, San Diego. His research on quantitative marketing and customer analytics draws rigorous, actionable insights out of large datasets for a positive impact on markets. Most of his work analyzes data-driven phenomena in advertising and digital platform settings. He has also published contributions in economics, law, political science, and psychology journals. Professor Wilbur serves as Associate Editor for Marketing Science and the Journal of Marketing Research and co-organizes the Workshop on Platform Analytics. CV and all published papers are available at KennethCWilbur.com.

Logistics details for each session will be provided to registered participants.  Sign up here to be included on the mailing list.

This talk is co-sponsored by USF's Master's in Applied Economics and the Stanford Causal Science Center. For additional information and abstracts from past talks, please click here.