Public “Beta” launches have become a preferred route of entry into the markets for new software products and web site based services. While beta testing of novel products is nothing new, typically such tests were done by experts within firm boundaries. What makes public beta testing so...

Online price comparison agents (shopbots) allow consumers to instantaneously receive price and other information from many online retailers. Online consumer clickstream data from ComScore Inc.demonstrate that consumers are increasingly using shopbots to conduct search. This phenomenon raises...

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 investigates the importance of network effects in the demand for ethanol-compatible vehicles and the supply of ethanol fuel retailers. An indirect network effect, or positive feedback loop, arises in this context due to spatially-dependent complementarities in the availability of...

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 examine the price decisions in a vertically differentiated duopoly where the decision to buy a good depends not only upon the intrinsic utility from consuming it but also upon the social attributes (prestige, uniqueness etc.) associated with its consumption. These social attributes are...

Positive network externalities can arise when consumers benefit from the consumption of compatible products by other consumers (user-positive consumption externalities) or, alternatively, when they incur costs from the consumption of incompatible products by other consumers (nonuser-negative...

The recent years have exhibited a burst in the amount of collaborative activities among firms selling complementary products. This paper aims at providing a rationale for such a large extent of collaboration ties among complementors. To this end, we analyze a game in which the two producers of a...

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 optimal strategy of a high-quality incumbent that faces a low-quality ad-sponsored competitor. In addition to competing through adjustments of tactical variables such as price or advertising intensity, we allow the incumbent to consider changes in its business model. We consider...