This paper advances our collective knowledge about the role of learning in retail agglomeration. Uncertainty about new markets provides an opportunity for sequential learning, where one firm's past entry decisions signal to others the potential profitability of risky markets. The setting is...

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...

As auctions are becoming the main mechanism for selling advertisement space on the web, marketing agencies specialized in bidding in online auctions are proliferating. We analyze theoretically how bidding delegation to a common marketing agency can undermine both revenues and efficiency of the...

We study firm performance dynamics in retail growth using a dynamic model of expansion that allow these dynamics to operate through an unobserved serially correlated process. The model is estimated with data on convenience-store chain diffusion across Japanese prefectures from 1982 to 2012,...

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 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...

This paper uses consumer search data to explain search frictions in online markets, within the context of an equilibrium search model. I use a novel dataset of consumer online browsing and purchasing behavior, which tracks all consumer search prior to each transaction. Using observed search...

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...

Using a large data set on consumers' web browsing and purchasing behavior we contrast various classical search models. We find that the benchmark model of sequential search with a known distributions of prices can be rejected based on the recall patterns we observe in the data. Moreover, we show...

We analyze the behavior of start-ups in e-commerce, namely on Austria's leading price-comparison-site, a multi-product environment with almost complete information. We use weekly panel data on price-quotes of digicams, Audio/HiFi-equipment and hardware. We furthermore use advanced estimation...