BlueSky Thinking Summary

Guy Aridor of Kellogg is an assistant professor of marketing who researches what happens to consumer behavior when Instagram or YouTube goes down—investigating how users replace these sites.

If the classical markets are driven by changes in prices, digital platforms are run as attention economies.

Faced with disruption, his experiments showed that users pivot to close, homogenous or heterogeneous substitute apps, an inertial habitual use driven by a phenomenon he termed inertia.

This insight is important to tech companies and policy makers in that it can help them in strategies and regulatory decisions against competitive dynamics, specially cases of potential monopolies born from mergers.

He justifies how, through the user's migration between apps during disruptions, research by Aridor lights up the rather complex market behaviors in the digital age to expose valuable insights into consumer preferences and competitive landscapes.