Essay 1: Shopping Goals, Goal Concreteness, and Conditional Promotions. We propose a two-stage model to describe the increasing concreteness of consumers' goals during the shopping process, testing the model through a series of field experiments at a convenience store. Using a number of...

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology has been one of the oldest renewed technologies with a promise of becoming a foundation of "The Internet of Things" in future. MIT's Auto-ID labs and EPCGlobal have been instrumental in advocating standards, making mass scale adoption a reality....

Individuals are involved in daily decision making situations under varying levels of certainty and ease of gathering information, characterized by many factors such as the need to make payments, or the desire to fulfill goals. Essay 1 proposes that when individuals are faced with environments...

In this thesis, based on the example case study of the Apple iTunes-iPods platform technology, two simple models are analyzed to gain a better understanding of open vs. closed business models as management and market strategies for multi-sided platforms. First, a simple model of a firm with a...

Essay 1: Translation Errors in the Aggregation of Consumer Recommendations There has been a substantial increase of websites providing consumers with recommendations about products and services. These recommendations are usually presented in the form of verbal reviews and numerical ratings. It...