As much as forty percent of social media users have been harassed online, but there is scarce causal evidence of how toxic content impacts user engagement and whether it is contagious. In a pre-registered field experiment, we recruited participants to install a browser extension, and randomly...

We quantify the effects of others' adoptions and word-of-mouth (volume and valence) on consumers' product adoption decisions. We differentiate between the effects of word-of-mouth and observed adoptions from friends ("personal network") and the effects of word-of-mouth and observed adoptions...

The advent of social media and peer-to-peer technologies offers the possibility of driving the full democratization of news and information, undercutting the agenda-setting of large media outlets and their relative control of news and information flows. We are now about a decade into the era of...

The skippable ad format, commonly used by online content platforms, gives a viewer the option to skip part of an advertisement after seeing some limited information, and jump directly to her desired content. It also enables these platforms to charge advertisers only when viewers attend to the...

Despite the widespread popularity of online opinion forums among consumers, the business value that such systems bring to organizations has, so far, remained an unanswered question. This paper addresses this question by studying the value of online movie ratings in forecasting motion picture...

This research provides an empirical test of the “Twitter effect,” which postulates that microblogging word of mouth (MWOM) shared through Twitter and similar services affects early product adoption behaviors by immediately disseminating consumers’ post-purchase quality evaluations. This is...

This paper quantifies the impact of online vaccine skepticism on pediatric vaccine uptake and health outcomes. We propose a novel methodology that combines Natural Language Processing and an instrumental variable strategy that leverages the intransitivity of the social network's connections. By...

This report presents evidence on the relationship between online platforms and businesses using these platforms to reach consumers or conduct their operations. First, we review the literature on vertical relationships both from a classic approach and from a multi-sided market perspective....

Consumer reviews may reflect not only perceived quality but also the difference between quality and price (perceived value). In markets where product prices change frequently, these price-influenced reviews may be biased as a signal of product quality when used by consumers possessing no...