Connecting Black-owned Businesses with the Student Market
Michael Hamilton
Michael Hamilton studies pricing strategies in markets ranging from online dating services and virtual objects in video games, to “opaque products,” where the customer finds out about features like color only after the purchase.
He also works to connect businesses with new markets. Hamilton, an assistant professor of business analytics and operations at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, is part of a grassroots project that collaborates with community partners to connect Black-owned businesses in the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh with the market of college students. The online platform developed by the project—412Connect—aims to coordinate interactions between student users and participating businesses using targeted recommendations via social media.
The 412Connect platform is not a search engine with large lists of Black-owned businesses, but instead highlights a specific group of businesses that work with the project to improve their digital presence and engagement with university students. The site features interactive games like a scavenger hunt as a way to keep students coming back to the site. Performance is measured by new follows on social media.
The project began with the group Grief to Action within the Center for Analytical Approaches to Social Innovation. Undergraduate students Colin Griffen and Tyler Olin built the original version of the website with support from Alex DiChristofano, a graduate student at Washington University. The project won the New Horizons Award for Bridging Research and Practice at the first Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization in 2021.
“This project was started during the early days of the pandemic, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder,” says Hamilton. “It began at a moment in time when members of the University community were looking for a way to make a positive impact in our city. My academic interest in the project is from the perspective of market design—the types of rules you can impose on markets to make them function better.”
It is an all-volunteer project across Pitt, connecting such entities as the School of Computing and Information, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and Department of Economics in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences.
“Small businesses have problems with reach and it’s really difficult and important to be in the conversation when consumers are looking for a service,” Hamilton says. “Our ultimate goal is that the businesses collaborating with us succeed broadly, and connecting them with Pitt students is hopefully part of their success.”