ABSTRACT
Online shoppers feel bamboozled when they browse for a particular item online and then become "haunted" by the same, or sister, products. Julie Matlin contemplated buying a pair of shoes online at Zappos, but did not go through with the purchase.' Even though Matlin did not want the shoes, the shoes appeared to want Matlin: "An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesmen who wouldn't take no for an answer."2 The ads that tirelessly trail users from site to site are a form of state-of-the-art online behavioral advertising known as retargeting-a type of advertising that "connects advertisers with past website visitors to entice those visitors to complete their online transactions or purchases."3
