Medical crowdfunding is a popular channel for people needing financial help paying medical bills to collect donations from large numbers of people. However, large heterogeneity exists in donations across cases, and fundraisers face significant uncertainty in whether their crowdfunding campaigns...

Despite the widespread adoption of search and recommendation technologies on the Internet, empirical research that examines the effect of these technologies is scarce. How do online consumers use these technologies? Does consumers’ technology usage have an effect on the sales to them or their...

Many markets have historically been dominated by a small number of best-selling products. The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes this common pattern of sales concentration. However, information technology in general and Internet markets in particular have the potential to...

The Internet is a much more accountable and measurable medium than traditional media. The unique property of the Internet being a medium with bidirectional information flows has enabled performance-based pricing models that tie online advertising payments directly to campaign measurement data...

The Internet and related information technologies are transforming the distribution of product sales across products, and the effects are likely to grow in coming years. Both the Long Tail and the Superstar effect are manifestations of these changes, yet researchers lack consistent metrics or...

Product variety is an important strategic tool that firms can use to attract customers and respond to competition. This study focuses on the retail industry and investigates how stores manage their product variety, contingent on the presence of competition and their actual distance from rivals....

Internet retailers have been making significant investments in web technologies, such as zoom, alternative photos, and color swatch, that are capable of providing detailed product-oriented information and, thereby, mitigating the lack of “touch-and-feel,” which, in turn, is expected to lower...

Internet consumers derive significant surplus from increased product variety, and in particular, the “Long Tail” of niche products that can be found on the Internet at retailers like Amazon.com. In this paper we analyze how the shape of Amazon’s sales distribution curve has changed from...