Paper Title
Customer Analytics: How do Online Intermediaries use it to their Advantage?
Abstract
Competitive Advantage is an area that has been researched over many years and with evolving times,
firms have adopted new strategies to survive and sustain their positions in the market.The internet revolution in
the late 90s changed the dynamics of the game between competitions across industries. Internet enabled multiple
players to come up with various business models to transact with consumers. Knowing your customer better and
tailoring offers to individual customers became the new mantra of competitive advantage. This was for the first
time every possible due to internet and Big Data. Theory has enough evidences that Internet driven businesses
are advantaged as they have tremendous access to granular consumer information like attitudes, behaviour,
purchases etc. that they can make use of to tailor their offerings using business analytics. In fact the internet
intermediaries exploit this information asymmetry to the extent of performing first degree price
discrimination.This paper aims to unearth the extent of use of customer analytics by online intermediaries to
gain and retain a competitive edge in the market.
Keywords - Big Data, Business Analytics, Competitive Advantage, Descriptive Analytics, Predictive Analytics,
Information Asymmetry