The value of promotional marketing and word-of-mouth (WOM) is well recognized, but few studies have compared the effects of these two types of information in online settings. This research examines the effect of marketing efforts and online WOM on product sales by measuring the effects of online...

The success of e-commerce companies in a Confucian cultural context takes more than advanced IT and process design that have proven successful in Western countries. The example of eBay’s failure in China indicates that earning the trust of Chinese consumers is essential to success, yet the...

With the increasing popularity of mobile applications, more and more e-commerce websites are providing mobile shopping services that enable their consumers to access their products and services through an additional mobile channel. Does the new channel bring new sales or just shift consumers...

This study examines how the unique information environment of online forums affects consumers' information acquisitions, and further impacts their purchase behavior. Based on the information foraging theory, we hypothesize that the relevant information patches in online forums facilitate...

Using a unique data set that includes individually identifiable consumer online browsing and purchase data in the restaurant industry, this paper examines how individual consumer shopping characteristics and product characteristics moderate the effect of online reviews on individual consumer...

As paid search becomes the mainstream platform for online advertising today, competition further intensifies. The main objective of this research is two-fold. On the one hand, we want to understand, in the context of paid-search advertising, the effects of competition (measured by number of ads...

Commonly, a coupon can be applied to one of several vertically differentiated products sold at different prices within the same product line of a brand. With such a product-line coupon, consumers need to decide on the specific product to buy, resulting in different levels of consumer spending....

This paper investigates the economic value of online reviews for consumers and restaurants. We use a dataset from Dianping.com, a leading Chinese website providing user-generated reviews, to study how consumers learn from reading online reviews the quality and cost of dining a restaurants. We...

Strategic complements are well understood for normal form games, but less so for extensive form games. There is some evidence that extensive form games with strategic complementarities are a very restrictive class of games (Echenique (2004)). We study necessary and sufficient conditions for...