Demonstrating compelling causal evidence of the existence and strength of peer to peer influence has become the holy grail of modern research in online social networks. In these networks, it has been consistently demonstrated that user characteristics and behavior tend to cluster both in space...

We examine how and why consumers engage in retributional acts directed towards brands that are perceived as harmful. Consumers are shown to lie, cheat, and steal as they attribute lower moral worth to harmful brands and this effect is shown to persist in the absence of any attributable brand...

Consumers’ purchase decisions can be influenced by others’ opinions, i.e., word-of-mouth (WOM), and/or others’ actions, i.e., observational learning. While information technologies are creating increasing opportunities for firms to facilitate/manage these two types of social interaction,...

Virtual agents wear many different names according to their use contexts, functionalities, degrees of anthropomorphism. They can also be visible or incarnated, or not (incarnated agents are called Embodied virtual agents or EVAs). They have been widely used since the 2000's and first generated a...

Third-party cookies and related 'offsite' tracking technologies are frequently used to share user data across applications in support of ad delivery. These data are viewed as highly valuable for online advertisers, but their usage faces increasing headwinds. In this paper, we quantify the...