Reference groups influence product and brand evaluations, especially when the product is a publicly consumed luxury good. Marketers of such luxury goods need to carefully balance two important social forces: (1) the desire of leaders to distinguish themselves from followers and (2) the...

Conventional wisdom suggests that one of the goals of manufacturer advertising is to reduce the cross-price elasticity between products (make one's own and rivals' products appear to be substitutable in the eyes of consumers). Conventional wisdom also suggests that, all else being equal,...

Click fraud is the practice of deceptively clicking on search ads with the intention of either increasing third-party website revenues or exhausting an advertiser's budget. Search advertisers are forced to trust that search engines detect and prevent click fraud even though the engines get paid...

Media firms compete in two connected markets. They face rivalry for the sale of content to consumers, and at the same time, they compete for advertisers seeking access to the attention of these consumers. We explore the implications of such two-sided competition on the actions and source of...

In this paper we analyze the joint implications of two effects: (a) inserting independent profit-maximizing retailers into the channel system provides “buffering” to the manufacturers from price competition when their products are highly substitutable and intrachannel contracts are...

In a competitive marketplace, the effectiveness of any element of the marketing mix is determined not only by its absolute value, but also by its relative value with respect to the competition. For example, the effectiveness of a price cut in increasing demand is critically related to...

This paper develops a model to address an important problem facing a manufacturer of a durable product. That is, how can it plan its new product introductions to minimize the obsolescence of the old product, preserve its market for the new product, and keep copycat products at bay? We analyze...

Idea generation (ideation) is critical to the design and marketing of new products, to marketing strategy, and to the creation of effective advertising copy. However, there has been relatively little formal research on the underlying incentives with which to encourage participants to focus their...

The e-marketplace has emerged as an important electronic shopping environment that, according to a recent report, may evolve into a dominant force in Internet marketing. We investigate an e-marketplace with online stores offering competing products. We find that featuring is associated with a...