On June 8, the award ceremony of the “Preis der Deutschen Marktforschung” took place in a digital format. This year's winner was the MCM student Anne Zeh who wrote her master’s thesis at the Chair of Marketing Management (IfM). She was supervised by Felix Lehmkuhle during the processing period of her thesis and was then nominated for this award at the suggestion of Professor Krafft.

The award in the category "Nachwuchsforscher 2021" honors young scientists at universities for their outstanding empirical research work in the field of market, media, opinion, and social research. The prize is awarded for work that demonstrates a particularly successful integration of sophisticated methodology and high practical relevance. It is awarded jointly by BVM (Berufsverband Deutscher Markt- und Sozialforscher), VMÖ (Verband der Marktforscher Österreichs) and SWISS INSIGHTS (Swiss Data Insights Association), with the aim to promote the exchange between science and practice.

The topic of the Master Thesis was "Ethical Consequences of Algorithmic Biases in Marketing" and deals with the problem that algorithms are becoming increasingly important in marketing and are used to provide objectivity to various issues. However, algorithms are vulnerable to biases in the underlying data, which are amplified by feedback effects in the processing of the algorithm. This can lead to discrimination against certain groups. In the thesis, a field experiment is conducted with 400 users clicking through a specifically tailored website while their behavior is tracked. The data is then analyzed using the machine learning algorithms Random Forest and Gradient Boosting. The results show that a user's location can be considered a proxy for education, demonstrating that discriminatory tendencies can occur in web attribution algorithms. This should raise awareness among marketing managers not to recklessly rely on algorithms, but to thoroughly question their data processing.

We are very happy about this success and congratulate Anne cordially on this achievement.