We conduct a field study in a U.S. health insurance firm to examine how product customization affects the firm's cost to serve customers through its call center. In our setting, the product is a complex health insurance plan. The firm incurs substantial costs in serving the customers through its...

Firms are investing millions to deploy web based self-services at their call centers primarily to reduce operating costs. The rationale is that the firm’s cost of interacting with customers through web based channel is an order of magnitude cheaper than the assisted channels like telephony....

Recent papers have shown that, in contrast to “the Long Tail” theory, movie sales remain concentrated in a small number of hits. These papers have argued that concentrated sales can be explained, in part, by heterogeneity in quality and increasing returns from social effects. Our research...

We conduct a field study with a US health insurance firm to examine how product customization affects firm’s cost to serve the customers through its call center. In our setting, the product is a complex health insurance plan. Firm incurs substantial cost in serving the customers through its...