As a common practice, various firms initially make information and access to their products/services scarce within a social network; identifying influential players that facilitate information dissemination emerges as a pivotal step for their success. In this paper, we tackle this problem using...

In this paper, we investigate a seller's voluntary disclosure strategy when serving two groups of consumers who arrive sequentially and are reference dependent with respect to product quality. Consumers may be naive or sophisticated, depending on whether they can make rational inferences from...

Economic growth in many countries is increasingly driven by successful startups that operate as online platforms. These success stories have motivated us to define and classify various online platforms according to their business models. This study discusses strategic and operational issues...

This paper examines optimal targeting and sequencing strategies in the setup proposed by Ballester et al. (2006). The setup features payoff externalities and strategic complementarity among players, who non-cooperatively determine their contributions. We first analyze a two-stage game in which...