  Online behavioral advertising (OBA) has a significant role in the digital
economy. It allows advertisers to target consumers categorized according to
their algorithmically inferred interests based on their behavioral data. As
Alphabet and Meta gatekeep the Internet with their digital platforms and
channel most of the consumer attention online, they are best placed to execute
OBA and earn profits far exceeding fair estimations. There are increasing
concerns that gatekeepers achieve such profitability at the expense of
consumers, advertisers, and publishers who are dependent on their services to
access the Internet. In particular, some claim that OBA systematically exploits
consumers' decision-making vulnerabilities, creating internet infrastructure
and relevant markets that optimize for consumer manipulation.
  Intuitively, consumer manipulation via OBA comes in tension with the ideal of
consumer autonomy in liberal democracies. Nevertheless, academia has largely
overlooked this phenomenon and instead has primarily focused on privacy and
discrimination concerns of OBA. This article redirects academic discourse and
regulatory focus on consumer manipulation via OBA. In doing so, first, this
article elaborates on how OBA works. Second, it constructs an analytic
framework for understanding manipulation. Third, it applies the theory of
manipulation to OBA. As a result, this article illustrates the extent to which
OBA leads to consumer manipulation. Crucially, this article is purely analytic
and avoids normative evaluation of consumer manipulation via OBA. Evaluating
consumer manipulation harms of OBA is an equally important but separate task
and is pursued in another publication.
