The Internet is a tool with the potential to enable consumers to effectively participate in collective bargaining in the marketplace. The purpose of this paper is to address the viability of the concept of countervailing power in the Internet era. First, some theoretical perspectives on how...

Rapid technological developments and deregulation of the telecommunications industry have changed the way in which content providers distribute and price their goods and services. Instead of selling a bundle of content and access through proprietary networks, these firms are shifting their...

This paper proposes using nonlinear mixed-integer programming to solve the customized bundle-pricing problem in which consumers are allowed to choose up to N goods out of a larger pool of J goods. Prior work has suggested that this mechanism has attractive features for the pricing of information...

Consumers' average value for information goods, websites, weather forecasts, music, and news declines with the number consumed. This paper provides simple guidelines to optimal bundling marketing strategies in this case. If consumers' values do not decrease too quickly, we show that bundling is...

We explore substitution patterns across advertising platforms. Using data on the advertising prices paid by lawyers for 139 Google search terms in 195 locations, we exploit a natural experiment in "ambulance-chaser" regulations across states. When lawyers cannot contact clients by mail,...

Internet technology has allowed for a higher degree of decoupling between the information-intensive sales process and the physical process of inventory management than its brick-and-mortar counterpart. As a result, some Internet retailers choose to outsource inventory and back-end operations to...

Firms that set up electronic marketplaces to enhance their supply and/or distribution channels face challenges in attracting their competitors to participate. A major obstacle is the perception that the owner can unfairly exploit trading information for competitive advantage. In this paper, we...

A commercial website was built to test six factors in consumers' online purchase decisions. A data set of 128 observations using the designed commercial website was collected to build a multiple-logistic, binary-purchase decision model. The individual and collective impacts of the selected six...