A dramatic shift from offline to online has happened in consumer behavior, leading to enterprises ploughing a large number of digital advertisements to capture consumers’ attention online. To evaluate the effectiveness of different online advertising, we explore the dynamic impacts of nine different online channels on the transition of consumers’ potential purchase intention and the consumer behavior. We use a continuous-time hidden Markov model (CT-HMM) to capture the transfer path of consumers who are affected by various online channels. Our findings reveal that online advertising has a positive and statistically significant impact on the transition of consumer purchase intention, of which search advertising can significantly increase consumers’ propensity to purchase, and its effect on transferring consumers from high to low purchase intention is not very strong in comparison. However, consumers have a very low annoyance threshold to short messaging service (SMS) advertising, and they are easy to get tired of SMS advertising and transfer to low purchase intention. Most firm-initiated advertising is more likely to transfer consumers to a low purchase intention state. Advertisements which can not improve consumer purchase intention very well have fewer stimulating effects on consumers’ information collection behavior than other advertisements. Our research contributes to the literature on the effectiveness of online advertising and provide some management insights for enterprises.

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With the rapid development of e-commerce and big data technology, firms can increase profits by implementing personalized pricing for specific consumers. However, this is affected by the externality of consumer privacy. To address this problem, this study establishes an intertemporal dynamic game model. Switching costs, firms’ personalized pricing orientation costs, and consumer privacy costs are then introduced into the model, and the effect of consumer privacy on personalized pricing is analyzed. The results show that improving firms’ pricing accuracy will aggravate market price competition, reduce firms’ profits, and improve consumer surplus. Consumer switching costs make it impossible for a firm to poach the loyal consumers of a rival firm through unified pricing, but poaching can also be achieved through group pricing. However, if the pricing accuracy of both firms is improved through personalization, poaching will not occur. Switching costs enhance the effect of improved pricing accuracy on the profit loss of both firms. Firms’ personalized pricing orientation costs and consumer privacy costs enhance the effect of personalized pricing strategies. Our research provides decision-making reference for enterprise pricing strategy.

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