Information generated in online markets can affect both buyers’ and sellers’ expectations and therefore their choices. In this research, we investigate the effect of market information, generated in online auction markets, on buyers’ expectations and choices. To clear large inventories,...

We study peer effects on individuals' contributions to a major form of word of mouth—online reviews. Provided by either consumers or third-party professionals, online reviews influence consumer purchasing decisions and hence sales. Individuals have conflicting incentives of free riding and...

Third-party skill certification is widely used in many markets, online and offline, to address the ubiquitous information asymmetry between workers and employers. In online labor markets, however, the usefulness of third-party certification is not yet fully established in that some leading...

One fundamental economic challenge in social gaming is how to monetize players. We address this problem from the lens of social influence. Specifically, we examine how players' paying behaviors in a social game are associated with their pure friends and Simmelian-tie friends. Analyzing a...

A growing number of vendors are using a sequence of online auctions to sell large inventories of identical items. Although bidding strategies and bidder behavior in single auctions have been extensively studied, limited research exists on bidding in sequential auctions. We seek to explain how...

Retailers are increasingly exploiting sequential online auctions as an effective and low cost distribution channel for disposing large quantities of inventory. In such auction environments, bidders have the opportunity of participating in many auctions to learn and choose the bidding strategy...

Online customer service chats provide new opportunities for firms to interact with their customers and have become increasingly popular in recent years for firms of all sizes. One reason for their popularity is the ability for customer service agents to multitask, i.e., interact with multiple...

To motivate user contributions, UGC (User-generated content) websites routinely deploy incentive hierarchies, where users achieve increasingly higher statuses in the community after achieving increasingly more difficult goals. Yet the existing empirical literature remains largely unclear whether...