We introduce the concept of marketing avoidance--consumer efforts to conceal themselves and to deflect marketing. The setting is one in which sellers market some item through solicitations to potential consumers, who differ in their benefit from the item and suffer harm from receiving...

This article studies the role of installment payments in relationships characterized by moral hazard and sunk costs. We rule out vertical integration and payments contingent on the product of the contractor. Instead, each payment is negotiated as and when made. In such circumstances, an initial...

How can two physically identical gasoline stations differentiate themselves? In this article we develop and test a model of service time competition: some stations set higher prices and thereby offer shorter queues, whereas others offer lower price and longer queues. We find that retail demand...

The objective of patent rights is to foster innovation and economic growth. However, to date, there is little robust evidence that patents achieve this objective. Here, we study the impact of changes in effective patent rights within panels of up to 54 manufacturing industries in up to 72...

We study the offers submitted by consumers to a large Name-Your-Own-Price (NYOP) online retailer. A distinctive feature of this retailer is that it allows consumers to repeatedly submit offers on one and the same product. While consumers could identify the threshold price (the minimum price for...

Previous research has examined whether price dispersion exists in theoretically highly efficient Internet markets. However, much of the previous work has been focused on industries with low cost and undifferentiated products. In this paper, we examine the presence of price dispersion and product...

We present a formal model of haggling between a name-your-own-price retailer and a set of individual buyers. Rather than posting a price, the retailer waits for potential buyers to submit offers for a given product and then chooses to either accept or reject them. Consumers whose offers have...

Understanding what motivates participation is a central theme in the research on open source software (OSS) development. Our study contributes by revealing how the different motivations of OSS developers are interrelated, how these motivations influence participation leading to performance, and...