Provides original sociological research on the development of consumer credit scoring in the United States and its links to subprime mortgage finance.

Research on innovation adoption has suffered from a bias towards understanding the factors that affect the dichotomous adoption/non-adoption decision. Much less attention is devoted to the question why potential adopters fail to progress to the adoption stage from earlier stages in the decision...

This article, a contribution to the ‘proto-industrialisation’ debate, examines the relative advantages of urban and rural locations for cloth manufacturing in later-medieval England and the Low Countries. From the 11th to the mid-14th century, when the English cloth trade began its seemingly...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts’ judgments, sometimes coming under the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers’ choices or they are conferred to the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data of the most important...

This paper studies content strategies for online publishers of digital information goods. It examines sampling strategies and compares their performance to paid content and free content strategies. A sampling strategy, where some of the content is offered for free and consumers are charged for...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts’ judgments, sometimes coming under the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers’ choices or they are conferred to the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data of the most important...

Product quality is often unobservable ex-ante and consumers rely on experts' judgments, sometimes in the form of ratings or awards. Do awards affect consumers' choices or, conversely, are they conferred on the most popular products? To disentangle this issue, we use data about the most important...

For certain products, consumers' misinformation about quality is more endemic at intermediate levels of the quality spectrum rather than at the top or the bottom levels of quality. Using an oligopoly model of vertical product differentiation with three quality levels - green, natural, and brown...

In 2009, the growth and revenue performance of district firms in Italy deteriorated sharply. The effects of the 2009 crisis were evident also in terms of distribution performance as the gap between the best and worst-performing firms widened. Nevertheless, despite the difficult economic...

Herding arises when an agents private information is swamped by public information in what Jackson and Kalai (1997) call a recurring game. The agent will fail to reveal his own information and will follow the actions of his predecessor and, as a result, useful information is lost, which might...