This Essay challenges the prevailing hostility towards data mining and direct marketing. The Essay starts by defining data mining and shows that the only important step is how data is used, not its aggregation or sorting. The Essay then discusses one particular type of data use, the sending of...

Hyper-media, owing to its ability to embed and link to information from other sources, has become an important modality for consuming news and information. Yet there remains a dearth of empirical research seeking to explain and forecast consumer behavior in this context. We develop a structural...

We propose a structural model to study the effect of online product reviews on consumer purchases of experiential products. Such purchases are characterized by limited repeat purchase behavior of the same product item (such as a book title), but significant past usage experience with other...

This paper considers duopolistic firms targeting informative messages to consumers who share information locally with their neighbors in the network graph. A monopolist targets efficiently by sending messages to a parsimonious set of nodes that leave the whole population informed either directly...

How does users’ freedom of choice, or the lack thereof, affect interface preferences? The research reported in this article approaches this question from two theoretical perspectives. The first of these argues that an interface with a dominant market share benefits from the absence of...

This Article considers the spillover effects of trademarks - in particular, brand spillovers, which occur when consumer interest in a trademark increases the profits of third parties who do not own the trademark. Using techniques such as loss leaders and shelf space adjacency, retailers...

Managers are very interested in word of mouth communication because they believe that a product's success is related to the word of mouth that it generates. However, there are at least three significant challenges associated with measuring word of mouth. First, how does one even gather the data?...

It has become common practice for retailers to personalize direct marketing efforts based on customer transaction histories as a tactic to increase sales. Targeted email offers featuring products in the same category as a customer's previous purchases generate higher purchase rates. However, a...

The prevalence of misinformation has spurred various interested parties--regulators, the media, and competing firms--to debunk false claims in the marketplace. This paper studies whether such debunking messages provided by these parties can impact consumer purchase behavior. If so, does...