We study how firm boundaries are affected by the reduction in search costs when business-to-business electronic markets are adopted. Our paper analyzes a multi-tier industry in which upstream parts suppliers incur procurement search costs, and downstream manufacturers incur incentive contracting...

Online commercial interactions have increased dramatically over the last decade, leading to the emergence of networks that link the electronic commerce landing pages of related products to one another. Our paper conjectures that the explicit visibility of such "product networks"can alter demand...

As Internet-based commerce becomes increasingly widespread, large data sets about the demand for and pricing of a wide variety of products become available. These present exciting new opportunities for empirical economic and business research, but also raise new statistical issues and...

This paper presents a model of local network effects in which agents connected in a social network each value the adoption of a product by a heterogeneous subset of other agents in their neighborhood, and have incomplete information about the structure and strength of adoption complementarities...

This paper analyzes optimal pricing for information goods under incomplete information, when both unlimited-usage (fixed-fee) pricing and usage-based pricing are feasible and administering usage-based pricing may involve transaction costs. It is shown that offering fixed-fee pricing in addition...

It has been conjectured that the peer-based recommendations associated with electronic commerce lead to a redistribution of demand from popular products or "blockbusters" to less popular or "niche" products, and that electronic markets will therefore be characterized by a "long tail" of demand...