Most of the empirical evidence on social advertising effectiveness focuses on a single product at a time. As a result, little is known about how the effectiveness of social advertising varies across product categories or product characteristics. We therefore collaborated with a large online...

A key question for Internet commerce is the nature of competition with traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. Although traditional retailers vastly outsell Internet retailers in most product categories, research on Internet retailing has largely neglected this fundamental dimension of...

Many markets have historically been dominated by a small number of best-selling products. The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes this common pattern of sales concentration. However, information technology in general and Internet markets in particular have the potential to...

We present findings from a controlled field experiment that allows us to investigate the dynamic effects of retail advertising. The experimental design overcomes limitations that have hindered previous investigations of this issue. Our study uncovers dynamic advertising effects that have not...

As the Internet develops into a robust channel for commerce, it will be important to understand the characteristics of electronic markets. Businesses, consumers, government regulators, and academic researchers face a variety of questions when analyzing these nascent markets. Will electronic...

We present a framework and empirical estimates that quantify the economic impact of increased product variety made available through electronic markets. Recent research has focused on the effect of increased competition on Internet market efficiency. While these efficiency gains significantly...

Price dispersion among commodity goods is typically attributed to consumer search costs. This paper explores the magnitude of consumer search benefits and costs using a data set obtained from a major Internet shopbot. For the median consumer, the benefits to searching lower screens are $6.55...

There have been many claims that the Internet represents a new nearly "frictionless market." Our research empirically analyzes the characteristics of the Internet as a channel for two categories of homogeneous products-books and CDs. Using a data set of over 8,500 price observations collected...