This paper provides a comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of online advertising markets, mostly based on techniques from the emergent discipline of complex systems analysis. First, we look at how the display rank of a URL link influences its click frequency, for both sponsored...

Sponsored search is the mechanism whereby where advertisers pay a fee to Internet search engines to be displayed alongside organic (non-sponsored) web search results. Based on prior literature, we draw an analogy between these markets and financial markets. We use the analogy as well as the key...

A method to generate hypotheses on consumer payment behavior from market basket data is presented with which retailers can predict future cash requirements. This could help retailers to minimize the costs of cash management through rationalization and may also encourage the introduction of new...

This paper describes two new datasets available to academic researchers. The first is a panel dataset containing the transactions of 19,936 households made over the period from December 1998 to November 2004 at a major U.S. consumer electronics retailer. There are a total of 173,262...

Why do consumers value shopping online? We decompose the value of e-commerce to individual consumers and highlight the role of convenience, i.e., the avoidance of transportation costs. We complement household purchase panel data with precise locations of consumers and stores, and show that...

This paper provides a new and complementary explanation for a pricing puzzle for seasonal products, namely, counter-cyclical pricing, drawing on the category-expansion effects of price promotions. Our study emphasizes the seasonal fluctuation in promotion frequency rather than the change in...

We examine how retailers discount the prices of product systems versus their constituent components. The topic is important because such systems are ubiquitous in our daily lives. In particular, many high-tech markets revolve around complex multi-component systems – e.g. a camera system...

The impact of product variety on welfare has received little attention in the electronic commerce literature. The problem with product variety is that more variety does not necessarily imply higher welfare. This paper finds the conditions under which more variety, if caused by lower fixed costs,...

Theory predicts intense price competition when firms cluster with rivals. Yet, strong evidence of clustering is found in previous empirical research. Researchers typically measure clustering by comparing observed location patterns to random assignment. The random assignment benchmark does not,...

Whereas the extant literature on entry-order effects establishes that first entrants often earn higher market shares ("market-share advantage"), the literature on distribution suggests increased distribution has a positive effect on sales. Can distribution help us better understand entry-order...