We examined whether people conform to or diverge from the most popular choice among their friends by conducting a large-scale field experiment on a leading social-networking site in China. Our setting allowed us to minimize confounding effects such as pre-existing taste similarities between a...

A product often has many attributes. The seller of the product may choose whether to disclose these attributes to consumers before their purchase. How do multiple attributes of the product jointly determine the seller's disclosure incentives? I analyze this question by modeling a monopolist...

Many scholars argue that content providers, when incentivized by ad revenue, are more likely to tailor their content to attract “eyeballs,” and as a result, popular content may be excessively supplied. We empirically test this prediction by taking advantage of the launch of an...

This paper examines the informational role of the variance of product ratings. We first build a theoretical model on how firm strategies and market outcomes respond to product ratings, and find that a higher variance of ratings increases subsequent demand and profit if, and only if, the average...

We investigate in a competitive setting the consequences of mobile targeting, the practice of firms setting prices based on consumers' real-time locations. A distinct market feature of mobile targeting is that a consumer could travel across different locations for an offer that minimizes his...

Extant literature suggests that consumers derive more happiness from experiences (e.g., vacations) than from material possessions (e.g., furniture). However, this literature typically pits material against experiential consumption, treating them as a single bipolar construct of their relative...

We consider a platform that matches service providers with potential customers. Ratings of a service provider reveal the quality of his service while ratings of a consumer reveal the cost to serve her. Under a competitive search framework, we study how bilateral ratings influence market...

A seller often needs to determine the amount of product information to provide to consumers. We model costly consumer information search in the presence of limited information. We derive the consumer's optimal stopping rule for the search process. We find that, in general, there is an...

In public health sectors of many developing countries, patients offer payments to their doctors outside the official payment channels. We argue that the fundamental cause of informal payments is that formal prices cannot fully differentiate patients' various needs. We compare welfare...