Consumers often use luxury products to signal their aspirational selves. In social media, consumers can publicly affiliate with such products and brands virtually without having to physically own them. This research demonstrates how social media can enable consumers to engage with aspirational...

By 2011, approximately 83% of Fortune 500 companies were using some form of social media to connect with consumers (Hameed 2011). Further, surveys suggest that consumers are increasingly relying on social media to learn about unfamiliar brands. However, best practices regarding the use of social...

Consumers increasingly inform one another about marketplace offerings in online forums. These forums vary in terms of the information provided about reviewers (e.g., consumers may have no information about a reviewer or may see a full reviewer profile containing multiple pieces of demographic...