To infer product fitness information, consumers often consult digital influencers who exert effort to learn and evaluate product features and then propagate information to their followers. However, influencers' recommendations are not limited to products that exactly match their expertise, which...

More and more marketplace platforms choose to use the data gathered from consumers (e.g., customer search terms, demographics) to provide a data analytics service for third-party sellers, both encouraging innovations and improving the operations of the latter. Through adopting the data analytics...

The freemium pricing model has become mainstream in the software industry. A large user base can induce positive network effects while expanding security risks associated with unpatched users. This study explores a two-stage decision problem faced by software vendors that involves a freemium...

Problem Definition: Omni-channel retailing has led to the use of traditional stores as fulfillment centers for online orders. Omni-channel fulfillment problems have two components: (1) accepting a certain number of on-line orders prior to seeing store demands, and (2) satisfying (or filling)...

Several mobile telecommunication companies (MTCs), such as AT&T, Verizon, and China Mobile, are investing in content services to drive continued growth as the telecom industry has become saturated. In this study, we investigate the competition between two MTCs, one of which (MTC 1) provides both...

Many software firms, especially mobile app providers, offer perpetually free basic products to users, but premiums are charged for access to the additional features or functionalities. While the free offering helps capture potential customers, it might cannibalize the sales of premium goods or...

This study analyzes the business model decision of social platforms with a commerce feature. In practice, social platforms can adopt either an advertising model or a brokerage model. We develop a game-theoretic model to recommend the better business model and investigate the effect of social...

We study Aumann and Serrano's (2008) risk index for sums of gambles that are not dependent. If the dependent parts are similarly ordered, then the risk index of the sum is always larger than the minimum of the risk indices of the two gambles. For negative dependence, the risk index of the sum is...

Volatility indices have been designed for many markets as gauges to measure investors' fear of market crash. The recent market turmoil has produced historically high volatility levels, in some cases around four times higher than their previous average levels. We take a look at the behavior of...

We study the risk index of an additive gamble proposed in Aumann and Serrano (2008). We establish a generalized duality result for this index and use it to prove Yaari's (1969) alternative characterization of DARA utilities. A new characterization result for the risk index is obtained through...