We use variation in wind speeds at surfing locations in Switzerland as exogenous shifters of users' propensity to post content about their surfing activity onto an online social network. We exploit this variation to test whether users' online content generation activity has a causal effect on...

We measure the revenue and cost implications to supermarkets of changing their price positioning strategy in oligopolistic downstream retail markets. Our estimates have implications for long-run market structure in the supermarket industry, and for measuring the sources of price rigidity in the...

New empirical models of consumer demand that incorporate social preferences, observational learning, word-of-mouth or network effects have the feature that the adoption of others in the reference group - the "installed-base" - has a causal effect on current adoption behavior. Estimation of such...

Marketing researchers have used models of consumer demand to forecast future sales; to describe and test theories of consumer behavior; and to measure the response to marketing interventions. The basic framework typically starts from microfoundations of expected utility theory to obtain a...

Observed contracts in the real-world are often very simple, partly reflecting the constraints faced by contracting firms in making the contracts more complex. We focus on one such rigidity, the constraints faced by firms in fine-tuning contracts to the full distribution of heterogeneity of its...

This paper reports on the development and implementation of a large-scale, marketing analytics framework for improving the segmentation, targeting and optimization of a consumer-facing firm's marketing activities. The framework leverages detailed transaction data of the type increasingly...

We present a framework to measure empirically the size of indirect network effects in high-technology markets with competing incompatible technology standards. These indirect network effects arise due to inter-dependence in demand for hardware and compatible software. By modeling the joint...

Discrete choice models of aggregate demand, such as the random coefficients logit, can handle large differentiated products categories parsimoniously while still providing flexible substitution patterns. However, the discrete choice assumption may not be appropriate for many categories in which...

Firms in durable good product markets face incentives to intertemporally price discriminate, by setting high initial prices to sell to consumers with the highest willingness to pay, and cutting prices thereafter to appeal to those with lower willingness to pay. A critical determinant of the...

In the context of introducing new products around the world, it is important to understand the relative attractiveness of various countries in terms of maximum penetration potential and diffusion speed. In this paper, we examine these market characteristics for a new category of prescription...