As online information availability for products and services is increasing and as buyers engage in more online search prior to purchase decisions, it is becoming more important for firms to know when to invest to reduce buyer uncertainty. This article argues that today's firms should view...

The advance selling strategy is implemented when a firm offers consumers the opportunity to order its product in advance of the regular selling season. Advance selling reduces uncertainty for both the firm and the buyer and enables the firm to update its forecast of future demand. The...

This paper studies the competition between firms for influencers in a network. Firms spend effort to convince influencers to recommend their products. The analysis identifies the offensive and defensive roles of spending on influencers. The value of an influencer only depends on the in-degree...

This paper investigates the optimal design of crowdfunding where crowdfunders are potential consumers with standard motivations and entrepreneurs are profit-maximizing agents. We characterize the typical crowdfunding mechanism where the entrepreneur commits to produce only if aggregate funding...

We discuss strategic ways that sellers can use tying and bundling with requirement conditions to extract consumer surplus. We analyze different types of tying and bundling creating (i) intra-product price discrimination; (ii) intra-consumer price discrimination; and (iii) inter-product price...

This paper examines how manager and firm characteristics relate to entry decisions in US local telephone markets. To do so, it develops a structural econometric model that allows managers to be heterogeneous in their ability to correctly conjecture competitor behavior. The model adapts Camerer,...

Proper configuration of security technologies is critical to balance the access and protection requirements of information. The common practice of using a layered security architecture that has multiple technologies amplifies the need for proper configuration because the configuration decision...

This paper analyzes a unique dataset of art auctions on eBay. We study the behavior of buyers and sellers, demand and supply, by means of a novel structural estimation approach. Our empirical framework considers the process of arrival of new bidders as well as the distribution of bidder...

This experiment focuses on a contest played over a star network of 6 nodes. By placing targets in a network, the value of a target is dependent on its connectivity to other targets. The experiment compares the cases where the defense is centrally planned by a defense planner with a case where...

I discuss the impact of tying, bundling, and loyalty/requirement rebates on consumer surplus in the affected markets. I show that the Chicago School Theory of a single monopoly surplus that justifies tying, bundling, and loyalty/requirement rebates on the basis of efficiency typically fails....