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...

An increasingly popular trend in online businesses is the adoption of the freemium model, in which premium features are provided along with free features. By providing free features to a large fraction of users and by managing the social interactions between users and their friends, online...

This paper aims to understand the effects of online communities on the network structure and their marketing implications. To account for the fact that communities are not formed exogenously, we model and estimate how they co-evolve with the friendship network. We control for unobserved...

Purpose: Recently, big data has received considerable industrial and academic attention. Social media(SM) are becoming reliable big data sources that include various information such as customer’s opinions, product reviews and trends. However, the supply chain management (SCM) field has been...