We develop an analytical framework to investigate the competitiveimplications of personalized pricing (PP), whereby firms chargedifferent prices to different consumers based on their willingness topay. We embed PP in a model of vertical product differentiation and showhow it affects firms’...

In many industries, Internet referral services, hosted either byindependent third-party infomediaries or by manufacturers, serve asdigitally enabled lead generators in electronic markets, directingconsumer traffic to downstream retailers in a distribution network. Thisreshapes the extended...

Piracy has been a major problem for perpetually licensed software. Usage-based licensing architecture such as pay-per-use or software-as-a-service can offer technology-based protection against piracy. We provide an analytical framework to examine the economic implications of pay-per-use versus...

Dale Carnegie once said that the sound of one’s name is the sweetest for any person. Much internet personalization acts on this mantra by trying to create an online environment where customers are greeted by name and are recommended products based on their preferences. However, no clear...

The abundance of flawed software has been identified as the main cause of the poor security of computer networks since major viruses and worms have been exploiting the vulnerabilities of such software. As an incentive mechanism for software security quality improvement, software liability has...

Advances in information technology increasingly allow firms to identify expensive, high-cost customers, who are not only individually less profitable for firms but also raise the average marginal cost incurred by firms and thus impose a negative externality on inexpensive customers. Should...

Recently fixed pricing and auctions have been brought together in a new pricing format that offers bidders the option of prematurely ending an auction at a fixed price. eBay calls this a “Buy-it- Now” auction, uBid calls this “UBuy it” and Yahoo auctions refer to this as a “Buy Now”....

My dissertation examines the effect of several changes occurring in the retail environment. In the first essay, I study competition among retail formats. I examine the phenomenon retailers call channel blurring: consumers moving their purchases from channels traditionally associated with that...