Among the millions of entrepreneurs in developing economies, few are able to earn a decent livelihood. To help these entrepreneurs succeed, governmental and nongovernmental organizations invest billions of dollars every year providing training programs. Many of these programs involve providing...

Car buying for more than 80% of consumers involves obtaining a loan at a dealership in the U.S. Many of these buyers unknowingly pay an undisclosed interest rate markup charged by car dealerships, i.e., a dealer markup. The opaqueness of the dealer markup practice and a regulatory vacuum have...

Online platform businesses have thrived and created enormous economic value in recent decades. However, disintermediation, which occurs when platform users bypass the platform to complete transactions directly, has become the Achilles’ heel of the platform business model, hurting platforms'...

In today’s digital economy, online reviews have become increasingly important for businesses and consumers. However, the downstream impacts of customer review content on reviewers’ own decisions are not well understood. The authors explore the relationships between customer review content...

Online retailers widely use prices and reviews, as additional information cues along with thumbnail pictures, when making product recommendations to consumers. They may use both prices and reviews (“dual cues”), either one (“single cue”), or simply display pictures of recommended...

The authors propose a new approach to simulate the likelihood of the sequential search model. By allowing search costs to be heterogeneous across consumers and products, the authors directly compute the joint probability of the search and purchase decision when consumers are searching for the...

We investigate the effects of online word of mouth on the demand for new products using Twitter data. Twitter can both generate buzz & awareness as well as provide information on product quality that can readily diffuse through the population. Leveraging comprehensive data from the US movie...