Many young firms use strategic actions to attract partners who help them increase the size of their operations quickly. This article examines the use of strategic actions to attract partners and increase system size in the context of franchising. We build on research in entrepreneurship,...

Though individual demand and supply equations can readily be expressed in logit models, closed-form solutions for equilibrium shares and prices are intractable due to the presence of products of polynomial and exponential terms. This hinders the employment of logit models in theoretical studies,...

Using three cohorts of data from field surveys of new car buyers in 1990, 2000, and 2002, this study seeks to determine how the Internet fits into patterns of information search for recent car buyers. We believe that our study provides the most complete analysis to date of how the Internet is...

While it provides excellent descriptions of behavior, existing consumer research on information seeking and processing largely fails to explain why consumers engage in various types of activities. This paper presents an economic framework for measuring costs/benefits of search behavior which can...

The purpose of this review is to provide an overview of various literatures related to consumer search for information, and its effect on markets. Normative models of consumer search prior to purchase, and of consumer search through experience, are reviewed first. Models of consumer...

A heterogeneous thresholds probit for ordered ratings is developed to remove conditional independence among responses and incorporate respondent traits. We propose a semiparametric approach to relaxing normality of random-effects in the probit model that account for differences in response...

No abstract available

In channel structures characterized by a powerful retailer (e.g., Wal-Mart, Home Depot), the dominant retailer's acceptance of a manufacturer's new product often determines the success of the new offering. Focusing on a manufacturer in such a market, we develop an approach to positioning and...

No abstract available