We investigate how competition for reputation among consumers can impact the effectiveness of firm interventions. In situations where the firm attempts to intervene to change consumer behavior (e.g., advertising, policy guidelines, legal threats), the consumer's response may depend not only on...

Reputation mechanisms have become an important component of electronic markets, helping to build trust and elicit cooperation among loosely connected and geographically dispersed economic agents. Understanding the impact of different reputation mechanism design parameters on the resulting market...

This paper offers a systematic exploration of reputation mechanism design in trading environments with opportunistic sellers, imperfect monitoring of a seller's actions and two possible seller effort levels, one of which has no value to buyers. The objective of reputation mechanisms in such...

Commerce depends on buyers and sellers fulfilling their contractual obligations; mechanisms inducing such performance are essential to well functioning markets. Internet-enabled reputation mechanisms that collect and disseminate consumer feedback have emerged as prominent means for inducing...

Managers and researchers alike suspect that the vast amounts of qualitative information found in blogs, product reviews, real estate listings, news stories, analyst reports and experts' advice influence consumer behavior. But, do these kinds of qualitative information impact or rather reflect...