Using a sample of long-term supply contracts collected from SEC filings, I show that hold-up concerns and information asymmetry are important determinants of contract design. Asymmetric information between buyers and suppliers leads to shorter term contracts. However, when longer duration...

Personalization is an integral part of e-commerce strategy today. A unique feature of personalization is that it requires users to provide a certain amount of personal information to the service provider, thus giving rise to an interesting dilemma in that consumers cannot enjoy more personalized...

Mutual funds stand ready at all times to sell and redeem common stock to the investing public for the net value of their assets under management. In the language of transaction cost economics, they are open-access common pools subject to virtually free investor entry and exit. The Investment...

In a market environment with random detection of product quality, a firm can employ umbrella branding as a strategy to convince consumers of the high quality of its products. Alternatively, a firm can rely on external certification of the quality of one or both of its products. We characterize...

Is the reputation of a firm tradeable when the previous owner has to retire even though ownership change is observable? We consider a competitive market in which a share of owners must retire in each period. New owners, observing only recent profits, bid for the firms on sale. Customers are...

Most studies of voluntary disclosure examine the securities market, where voluntary disclosure is incremental to the requirements of highly developed reporting standards. In this paper, I examine the market for new franchises, where there is no requirement that potential franchise investors be...

We study the incentives of a social network to control two types of information circulating on its platform, namely display advertising by two quality-differentiated firms and "social information" (purchasing decisions shared among consumers). Consumers' choices are influenced by both of these...

This paper offers a model of crowdfunding that represents a growing area of interest among practitioners and theorists. It is one of the first articles analyzing the choice between different types of crowdfunding (reward-based vs. equity-based) and the choice between crowdfunding and traditional...

In many environments, including credit and online markets, past records about participants are collected, published, and erased after some time. We study the effects of erasing past records on trade and welfare in a dynamic market where each seller's quality follows a Markov process and buyers...

In many environments, including credit and online markets, past records about participants are collected, published, and erased after some time. We study the effects of erasing past records on trade and welfare in a dynamic market where each seller's quality follows a Markov process and buyers...