Many video ads are designed to go viral, so that the total number of views they receive depends on customers sharing the ads with their friends. This paper explores the relationship between achieving this endogenous reach and the effectiveness of the ad at persuading a consumer to purchase or...

This paper investigates how internet users' perception of control over their personal information affects how likely they are to click on online advertising. The paper uses data from a randomized field experiment that examined the relative effectiveness of personalizing ad copy to mesh with...

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...

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...

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...

Sponsored search advertising is ascendant---Jupiter Research reports expenditures rose 28% in 2007 to $8.9B and will continue to rise at a 15% CAGR, making it one of the major trends to affect the marketing landscape. Yet little, if any empirical research focuses upon search engine marketing...

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...

This paper examines the effect of recommender systems on the diversity of sales. Two anecdotal views exist about such effects. Some believe recommenders help consumers discover new products and thus increase sales diversity. Others believe recommenders only reinforce the popularity of already...

We study oligopolistic firms' incentives to share customer information about past purchase history in a situation where firms are uncertain about whether a particular consumer considers the product offerings complements or substitutes. By addressing this new type of behavior-based price...

I present a model to assess the impact of demand-side factors on the concentration of sales within large product assortments. Consumers face a search problem within an assortment of horizontally differentiated products supplied by a monopolist. They may search for a product match by drawing...