Many video ads are designed to go 'viral,' so that the total number of views they receive depends on customers sharing the ads with their friends. This paper explores the relationship between number of views and how persuasive the ad is at convincing consumers to purchase or to adopt a favorable...

Digital technologies lead consumers to instantaneously engage with companies online following TV advertising. As a result, companies increasingly aim to coordinate TV advertising with consumer online behavior. This has led companies and researchers to examine the effect of TV ads on online...

Online rating systems can lead, on occasion, to reviews that are unfair or un-representative of the true quality provided. On the one hand, receiving an unfairly low rating once, might induce someone a platform supplier to exert more effort and receive a better rating the next time. On the other...

Online rating systems can lead, on occasion, to reviews that are unfair or unrepresentative of the true quality provided. On the one hand, receiving an unfairly low rating once, might induce participants to exert more effort and receive a better rating the next time. On the other hand, it might...

In a globalized digital economy, it is not clear whether it is better to use globally- or domestically-oriented images in marketing communications, or how the optimal strategy would be affected by economic inequality. We explore this using field experiment data from Facebook in India. In these...

How does firm size affect privacy protections offered to customers? On the one hand, it could be that larger firms use their size to amass more data. On the other hand, smaller firms may be less careful in their data protection practices. We empirically analyze a special subset of apps where...

The use of testimonials from existing customers has always been an important technique in traditional marketing communications. However, it is not clear whether attempts by firms to promote customer testimonials in social media will be equally effective. First, often the reach of a firm on...

Firms can now serve personalized recommendations to consumers who return to their website, based on their earlier browsing history on that website. At the same time, online advertising has greatly advanced in its use of external browsing data across the web to target internet ads. 'Dynamic...

We explore substitution patterns across advertising platforms. Using data on the advertising prices paid by lawyers for 139 Google search terms in 195 locations, we exploit a natural experiment in “ambulance-chaser” regulations across states. When lawyers cannot contact clients by mail,...

In the digital economy, influencing and controlling the spread of information is a key concern for firms. One way firms try to achieve this is to target firm communications to consumers who embrace and propagate the spread of new information on emerging and `trending' topics on social media....