(Phys.org)—A small team of researchers from Columbia Business School, Stanford University and the Wharton School of Business all in the U.S. and the University of Cambridge in the U.K. has found a way to show that sellers targeting ads at users based on their profiles on Facebook can have a dramatic impact on sales. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes the experiment they carried out, what they found, and some possible implications of their findings.