Trust is particularly important in online markets to facilitate the transfer of sensitive consumer information to online retailers. In electronic markets, various proposals have been made to facilitate these information transfers. We develop analytic models of hidden information to analyze the...

As the Internet develops into a robust channel for commerce, it will be important to understand the characteristics of electronic markets. Businesses, consumers, government regulators, and academic researchers face a variety of questions when analyzing these nascent markets. Will electronic...

We present a framework and empirical estimates that quantify the economic impact of increased product variety made available through electronic markets. Recent research has focused on the effect of increased competition on Internet market efficiency. While these efficiency gains significantly...

Price dispersion among commodity goods is typically attributed to consumer search costs. This paper explores the magnitude of consumer search benefits and costs using a data set obtained from a major Internet shopbot. For the median consumer, the benefits to searching lower screens are $6.55...

There have been many claims that the Internet represents a new nearly "frictionless market." Our research empirically analyzes the characteristics of the Internet as a channel for two categories of homogeneous products-books and CDs. Using a data set of over 8,500 price observations collected...

Both theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that in markets withstandards competition, strong network effects can make the strong growstronger and, in some circumstances, even 'tip' the market towards asingle, winner-take-all standard. We theorize that in the presence oflow cost conversion...

Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are a vital component of the Internet’s content delivery value chain, servicing nearly a third of the Internet’s most popular content sites. However, in spite of their strategic importance little is known about the optimal pricing policies or adoption drivers...

Recent IT research has analyzed how the performance of IT-enabled markets may differ from conventional markets. This literature has made two unexpected empirical findings. First, ITenabled markets for commodity goods exhibit significant price dispersion. Second, well-known retailers in these...

Theoretical and empirical evidence suggest that in many markets with standards competition, network effects make the strong grow stronger and can “tip” the market toward a single, winner-take-all standard. We hypothesize, however, that this sort of standards-induced market dominance may be...

In spite of industry concerns, prior work has shown that Internet used book markets do not significantly cannibalize new book sales. In this research note we analyze similar data from markets for CDs and DVDs, goods that because of their digital characteristics may be more susceptible to...