There are many situations in which a customer’s proclivity to buy the product of any firm depends not only on the classical attributes of the product such as its price and quality, but also on who else is buying the same product. Under quite general circumstances, it turns out that...

It is well established in the literature that customer retention is at least as important as customer acquisition, especially in the freemium-based virtual economy, in which individuals are connected by multi-relational social networks, such as the “friendships” and “guilds” (virtual...

In this paper a network model is developed in which three players sequentially choose their strategies. In the first stage, a profit–maximizing network firm chooses the price and thus the size of the network. In the second stage the consumers decide whether to join in the network or not. In...