Can negative information about a product increase sales, and if so, when? Although popular wisdom suggests that "any publicity is good publicity," prior research has demonstrated only downsides to negative press. Negative reviews or word of mouth, for example, have been found to hurt product...

This paper uses detailed weekly data on sales of hardcover fiction books to evaluate the impact of the <i>New York Times</i> bestseller list on sales and product variety. In order to circumvent the obvious problem of simultaneity of sales and bestseller status, the analysis exploits time lags and...