Many firms increasingly offer community venues to their customers to facilitate social interactions amongst them. Prior studies have shown that community participants have high engagement and loyalty toward the firm and provide useful feedback and referrals. However, it is not clear whether...

Firm-hosted virtual peer-to-peer problem solving (P3) communities offer a low-cost, credible, and effective means of delivering education and ongoing assistance services to customers of complex, frequently evolving products. Building upon the social constructivist view on learning and drawing...

Although consumers increasingly use online communities for various activities, little is known regarding how participation in them affects individuals' decision making strategies. Through a series of field and laboratory studies, we demonstrate that participation in an online community increases...

The conventional wisdom, grounded in deontological ethics, is that retailers should extinguish unethical customer behavior. However, there exists an opposing teleological view that unethical behavior may be tolerated if its ultimate consequences are beneficial for all stakeholders. This is...