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 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 study optimal cartel prices in a two-sided market. We present a simple model showing that prices above the two-sided monopoly price may prevail on one side of a two-sided market as a means to enhance the sustainability of the cartel. We prove that in such a case a higher benefit from the...

The aim of this research is to analyze whether and when ratings are informative signals about the quality of movies. The ratings data of Netflix is used to fit a structural Bayesian learning model. This model links revealed experience utilities of raters, previous consumers, to the product...

This paper examines price data on over 222 LCD televisions to estimate indirect network effects arising from two sources. First, we conjecture that the disconnect between the timing of when broadcasters are required to convert to an only digital-signal world and when television manufacturers...

The phenomenon of sponsored search advertising where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (non-sponsored) web search results is gaining ground as the largest source of revenues for search engines. Using a unique panel dataset of several hundred...

We study the online contagion of exogenous demand shocks generated by book reviews featured on the Oprah Winfrey TV show and published in the New York Times, through the co-purchase recommendation network on Amazon.com. These exogenous events may ripple through and affect the demand for a...

Understanding the process of software adoption is of paramount importance to software start-ups. We study a monopolistic seller’s optimal consumer network structure formation (seeding, segmentation, sequencing, and pricing strategies) under network effects. We demonstrate the importance of...

We analyze the linking and versioning strategies of a media firm when facing competition from blogs, search engines and news aggregators. First, we show that when the publisher competes against a blog it is less likely to release a “fighting version” if this generates significant spillovers...