It is well established in the literature that customer retention is at least as important as customer acquisition, especially in the freemium-based virtual economy, in which individuals are connected by multi-relational social networks, such as the “friendships” and “guilds” (virtual...

The exponential growth in digital media has raised questions about the relevance of printmedia in the overall marketing mix. In this study, we evaluate the relative effectiveness of printand digital media in advertising using a multi-methodological approach. Using eye-tracking...

Fake news is increasingly prevalent on social media, and the anonymity of the Internet is a major enabler. Social media platforms seek to reduce online anonymity with identity verification by verifying user identities with email addresses, phone numbers, or government-issued photo...

The traditional measure of consumer surplus (CS) (willingness to pay minus price paid) is captured at the time the transaction takes place, implicitly assuming that actual quality received (ex-post) is identical to quality expected (ex-ante). However, when the exchange of goods does not occur...

Social influence shapes consumers' decision-making process by observing other consumers' actions. Having shown that social influence affects consumers' actual purchases (beyond price and discount) using longitudinal secondary data from Groupon, we conducted a lab experiment, including eye...

Visionaries have conjectured that the world is becoming a level playing field due to the Internet that allows people to connect from anywhere around the globe. We examine this “flat world” conjecture in the context of online labor markets by theoretically proposing and empirically...

Online labor markets, two-sided platforms that match buyers with freelancers for IT services, have become increasingly important for sourcing labor and creating jobs around the globe. However, matching buyers and freelancers is challenging, largely because of the difficulty in pricing...

User registration is an important prerequisite for the success of many websites that rely on network externalities for value creation, such as social networking and directory websites that need a large number of users to create network externalities. It is not always desirable for users,...

Enabled by advances in information and communications technologies, open contests in online labor markets allow employers (individuals and companies of any size) to access a large pool of labor, thus creating an efficient alternative for sourcing labor globally with significantly lower costs...

This paper focuses on how information and technology drive digital business innovation in business ecosystems where multiple co-contributors work together to innovate new business models. Specifically, we develop a framework based on two novel concepts — (1) digital business innovation (DBI)...