Consumer review systems have become an important marketing communication tool through which consumers share and learn product information. Although there is abundant evidence that consumer reviews have significant impact on consumer purchasing decisions, the design of consumer review systems and...

This paper explores differences in consumers' grocery shopping behavior when they shop online and in a brick-and-mortar store. To do so, I assemble a new scanner dataset that tracks customers' grocery purchases in-store and on the Internet. This allows comparison in behavior of the same...

We analyze the behavior of start-ups in e-commerce, namely on Austria's leading price-comparison-site, a multi-product environment with almost complete information. We use weekly panel data on price-quotes of digicams, Audio/HiFi-equipment and hardware. We furthermore use advanced estimation...

Paid placement, where advertisers bid payments to a search engine to have their products appear next to keyword search results, has emerged as a predominant form of advertising on the Internet. This paper studies a product-di¤erentiation model where consumers are initially uncertain about the...

The increasing pervasiveness of the Internet has dramatically changed the way that consumers shop for goods. Consumer-generated product reviews have become a valuable source of information for customers, who read the reviews and decide whether to buy the product based on the information...

This paper studies peer-to-peer (p2p) lending on the Internet. Prosper.com, the first p2p lending website in the US, matches individual lenders and borrowers for unsecured consumer loans. Using transaction data from June 1, 2006 to July 31, 2008, we examine what information problems exist on...

We conduct a field experiment at a nonprofit organization’s online store to study how demand changes when consumers’ purchases generate revenue for a charitable cause. Consumers respond strongly when their purchases generate small donations by an anonymous outside group, but responses are...

When firms can identify their past customers, they may use information about purchase histories in order to price discriminate. We present a model with a monopolist and a continuum of heterogeneous consumers, where consumers can opt out from being identified, possibly at a cost. We find that...